The background image is A group of professionally dressed people are seated around a table, with their eyes closed and their hands outstretched, praying together.
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
8:01 a.m.
Seven chaplains gather in a conference room on the first floor of the medical center. They sit around a wooden table behind mugs of coffee.
Every morning, Pastoral Services gathers to talk about what’s coming that day. Much of it flows from the day before. They page through the previous day’s end-of-shift reports ― logs the chaplains keep that list 24 hours’ worth of emergencies, miracles and tragedies – to see what work is left to do.
Kelsey O’Brien, a chaplain assigned to Palliative Care, gives “a shout-out to Paul for doing the wedding yesterday.”
Sometimes, the chaplains officiate weddings for patients. Chaplain Paul Carter performed a service yesterday for David Weatherholtz III of Lebanon, who has terminal cancer, and his girlfriend, Cassandra. He met the couple about a half hour before the ceremony. The groom laid in a hospital bed. His bride stood next to him. They asked Carter to keep his sermon to five to seven minutes.
Like so many of the chaplain-officiated weddings, the union might only last days before death parts the couple. It would be amazing, Carter says, if somehow he was able to ensure the couple could have a life together.
“That would be a miracle,” Staff Chaplain Darlene Miller Cooley says.
They discuss the other events of the weekend. A car accident. A seriously injured 18-month-old child.
The meeting ends with a prayer.
January - December 2020
The background image is A woman in a hospital bed holds a tissue to her face. A woman sits next to her with a concerned look.
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
8:35 a.m.
Ordinarily, O’Brien goes to the Center of Excellence in Palliative Care. Each chaplain is assigned to a different portion of the hospital, and at Palliative Care O’Brien sometimes helps monitor up to 40 patients at a time. On this day, the meeting is delayed until 9 a.m., so O’Brien decided to do some drop-ins ahead of time.
She visits with Teresa Mercer of Carlisle, who is suffering from pancreatic cancer. Mercer was supposed to have been discharged the day before, but the oxygen levels in her blood and her blood pressure had dropped. Doctors asked her to stay for more tests.
“I’m not ready,” Mercer blurts at one point during the conversation. “I don’t think anyone is, but I hope when the time comes, I’m right with God and my children are, too. That’s my only concern, because I wasn’t when my mom passed. It’s been 24 years, and I carried it all since then. I can tell you in detail everything that happened. I remember the hospice nurse coming around and different things.”
“So you are reliving that now as you are sitting here?” O’Brien asks, kneeling beside her bed.
Mercer wants something better for her kids. She has a daughter in Florida who is in poor health and another child who is in denial that Mercer is dying.
O’Brien mostly listens. The thin, bespectacled woman was an intern in Pastoral Services before she was hired two years ago. Members of the Pastoral Services staff are either interns, who might move on to become ministers at a church somewhere, or full-timers, like O’Brien, who know this is the job they want to do. Some of the chaplains are certified by the Association of Professional Chaplains. O’Brien has been both intern and full-timer.
“It’s amazing what people will tell you when you are not wearing a white coat,” she says. “They think (doctors) only need to know certain things. The biggest thing is getting them to share what matters most to them. The end-of-life stuff, how far they want to go with treatment. Sometimes they will tell you all about their physical body but won’t tell you about how they are doing and feeling.”
Before she leaves, she says, “I work closely with the palliative care team, so maybe we can keep talking. That good?”
“Yeah,” Mercer says, “I’ve got to talk.”
“I know,” O’Brien says. “We’re going to keep talking.”
January - December 2020
The background image is A hand holds a plastic light designed to look like a squat candle.
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
9:15 a.m.
O’Brien checks in with Mercer’s doctors. Chaplains sometimes talk as much with doctors as with patients. Sometimes a chaplain can serve as a go-between or at least an opening to an important treatment discussion.
Afterward, O’Brien is running late for the palliative care meeting.
The group is a collection of physicians, residents, volunteer coordinators and social workers who discuss how to best to administer palliative care, which focuses on providing relief from pain for chronic and seriously ill patients. They meet in a small room to go over cases.
O’Brien talks about Mercer and some of the other patients and programs with which she’s working. At the end of the meeting, she reads a poem.
“Some of the patients you work with you fall in love with, and they do die,” she says. “Actually, most of the patients I work with do. You have to learn to be OK with loss and work with it.”
How does she handle the grief?
“I like poetry,” she says. “Like that poem I read at the meeting about how sorrow and joy are two sides of the same coin. That’s what a lot of my experience has been with palliative care patients.”
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
9:57 a.m.
Cooley heads to the Heart and Vascular Institute to visit with a patient who had a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) implanted, and see how she’s dealing with a very stressful family dynamic.
Cooley is an ordained Baptist minister who has served as pastor at churches in Harrisburg. She’s been a chaplain at Hershey Medical Center since 2013.
Before she became a minister, she worked for 37 years at the Naval Supply Depot in Mechanicsburg, handling social justice work, federal contractor compliance, employee labor relations, workforce diversity and wellness programs.
In 2007 she told her boss she was quitting to become a minister. He told her she had always been one.
Outside the patient’s door, she asks a rhetorical question, “You know how folks crave love so much sometimes that they will even embrace rejection as love?”
She walks into the dimly lit room. “Good morning!” she says. “Why is it so dark in here? Can we turn the lights on a bit? How you doing today?”
Darlene Ramsey from Steelton tells Cooley she’s doing better, that she and her daughter had had a talk and that she had prayed about their relationship. Family fights have weighed heavily on Ramsey’s recovery.
“My concern is you,” Cooley says. “Even in letting go, you still hold on. I don’t want you to continue to be hurt because it does impact your condition.”
They talk about her family and how she must lose weight to be healthy enough for a heart transplant.
“Yesterday after we talked, I sat and went over my whole life,” Ramsey says. “Not that I think I’m going to die any time soon, but this is my reality now.”
“God is not going to give you more than you can handle,” Cooley says. “But don’t put more on you. Lose the weight. Get healthy enough so you can have the heart transplant. You have such a heart and you reach out to anybody and you don’t have to.”
They pray and hug, and Cooley moves on.
“Sometimes when they need care, that’s when they find out who their family really is,” Cooley says after she closes the doors. “I have seen wives leave their husbands and husbands leave their wives. It makes you think about what vows really mean – till death do us part.”
The background image is Two women hold hands with one another and a man lying in a hospital bed. The women bow their heads and the man closes his eyes.
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
10:28 a.m.
Cooley swings by another room to meet with another heart patient – one of her favorites – a man named Al from Mechanicsburg.
Last September, Al, a local business owner, felt sick. He went to another hospital in Camp Hill, where doctors discovered a blockage. He needed surgery immediately.
A Life Lion helicopter brought him to Hershey Medical Center, where doctors performed bypass surgery and installed an LVAD. The pump needs a new part, it turns out, so he’d come to the Heart and Vascular Institute to have it surgically installed.
“I’ve been through a lot,” Al says. “I’m lucky to be here. They call me a miracle. I take each day one at a time.”
“How do you cope?” Cooley asks.
“I get a little depressed,” he says. “Sometimes, a little angry.”
They talk about coping. Cooley compliments Al on his singing. Al sings her a few bars of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” He tells more stories. Cooley listens. Al has been here 11 days and is waiting to be cleared for surgery. When he first arrived, doctors weren’t sure he’d survive.
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
11:04 a.m.
Cooley looks in on Nelson. Today, he’s waiting to be transported to Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles where he’ll receive, at long last, his new heart.
“The support there will be more than I have here,” he says. Cooley visits with Nelson as often as she can because the turn of events is depressing. He has no family in the area, and his mother is ill.
“It’s very important to understand the type of relational support they have,” Cooley explains. “There are always holes in that so you have to try to fill those holes and get to know the person.”
Eventually, Nelson closes his eyes to rest. Cooley says a prayer for him. Nelson begins to cry. They hug.
“You don’t know how she has touched my life,” he says. “They are tears of joy.”
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
11:31 a.m.
Cooley’s cell phone rings. Someone on the fourth floor has summoned her.
Here, there has been a disturbance involving a patient who hurt him- or herself. The fourth floor ― Acute Care ― can be stressful. Sometimes patients become suicidal.
Helping health care professionals manage that stress is another part of a chaplain’s job.
“Patients and their families are our first priority,” Cooley says, “but our staff sees so many horrible things, they experience post-traumatic stress from being exposed to trauma time and again.”
Two weeks ago, Cooley did a session for neurology nurses on how to deal with grief. It involved a bowl of water positioned in a middle of a room. Health care workers were invited to write their grief onto a piece of dissolvable paper and watch it dissolve in the water. Then, they poured the water on rosebushes.
“Even though we are burdened with grief,” Cooley said, “God or the divine can use that to make things grow and make us grow.”
She cares for herself with meditation, exercise, working with youth and young adults at her church and a nice bath with Epsom salts.
“So I can soak it all out,” she says. “I know I can’t carry it all, and I have to be able to release it.”
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
12:25 p.m.
Chaplain Intern Susan Scott waits in the trauma bay for the Penn State Life Lion helicopter to arrive with a 3-year-old autistic boy from Pottsville.
The child fell face-first after being pushed off a 6-foot-high piece of playground equipment by another child. Minutes later, the Life Lion team wheels the child, strapped in a gurney with a stuffed animal on top of his chest, down the hallway.
Scott, pink plastic clipboard in hand, approaches the team to collect vital information.
“I’m trying to figure out who is this person,” Scott says. “Do they have family en route? If they do, I will wait for the parents and provide support.”
The Life Lion team member confirms the parents are on their way and soon the boy, dressed in jean shorts, a red-and-white-striped shirt and sandals, is wheeled into a trauma treatment room. The door closes and the boy’s cries pierce the silence. The parents are about a half-hour away.
“I’ll be here when they arrive,” Scott says.
The background image is A man stands next to a hospital bed and crosses his arms, resting his chin in the palm of his hands. He’s looking at a man in the hospital bed, who has a hand to his brow.
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
1:42 p.m.
Carter, an ordained American Baptist minister, waits outside a room in the Medical Intensive Care Unit. Carter wants to check on David Weatherholtz III, the terminal patient whose wedding he officiated yesterday. “Usually, there’s a three-day waiting period to get a marriage license,” Carter explains. “We had to get court permission to speed it up.”
Finally, Carter is able to visit David. “Yesterday was a pretty big day,” Carter says, standing next to David’s bed.
David, covered with his favorite Dallas Cowboys blanket, nods. “It was the best day!”
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
1:50 p.m.
David’s daughter Haley Weatherholtz, 22, sits on a chair in the corner of the room. She has been sleeping in her dad’s room since arriving Sunday from her home in Tampa, Fla. David’s wife, Cassandra, straightens up the room and points to the wedding decorations the hospital provided.
“The hospital staff did a wonderful job,” she says.
David agrees.
“On Tuesday, they wanted to put me on life support,” David says. “I told them no. I need to marry my girlfriend.”
Carter listens more than he talks as David shares his life story.
“God has already given me many miracles in my life,” David says. “I’m hoping he grants me another miracle and lets me walk out of the hospital. I’m fighting until my last breath. I have God on my side.”
Carter was a church minister for 35 years before entering the chaplaincy program.
“We see people of all faiths ― Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish ― and people who have no faith,” he says. “I’m not here to win people over to my faith but to steady them, support them, sustain them. Sometimes just being there helps. We don’t always feel like we’ve succeeded but we try.”
The background image is A woman shows another woman a piece of paper held against a leather portfolio in a hospital hallway.
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
2:16 p.m.
Chaplain resident Rose Baer visits the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).
In one corner, a father rocks his baby. In another corner, a mother and father bend over their child’s crib. Beeps, which sound like they are coming from a pinball machine, fill the air.
Baer disappears into the dimly lit room, searching for a mother she had spent time with before.
The mother, she learns, has already left for the day.
Baer has spent the last 15 years working with elderly and end-of-life issues.
“I love NICU,” she says. “I knew it would really stretch me. I’m here to support women and parents of healthy babies and experience their joy. And I’m here to help grieving parents.”
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
2:20 p.m.
Baer runs into Mia and Sydney Godwin in the hallway outside of the NICU. The moms, who live in Lancaster, are taking one of their triplets home.
“I’m so happy for you,” Baer says. Mia, who was on hospital bed rest for 5 1/2 weeks, finishes adjusting the straps on baby Ava’s stroller.
“I’m so happy,” she says. “There were days when it felt like we were taking two steps forward, then two steps back.”
“It was such a roller coaster,” Sydney says.
The triplets ― Ava, Mia and Kai ― were born on May 16. “Mia will probably come home in a couple of days,” Sydney says. “And then Kai.”
The moms walk down the hallway and stop for a selfie. “My biggest role is presence of listening and honoring what I hear and see,” Baer says. “They have a wonderful story.”
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
3:01 p.m.
January - December 2020
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
3:10 p.m.
Baer visits Tracey Peterson, nurse manager, and Julie Becker, nurse educator, in the Women’s Health Unit.
“Usually this is a happy place,” Peterson says. “But when it’s not, we call Rose.”
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
3:18 p.m.
Baer heads to the basement, where Environmental Health Services is located. She had made the same trek Monday night while on call after learning that an employee passed away suddenly and his co-workers were shocked and upset.
“I’ve been wanting to check back with these folks and make sure they’re OK. Sometimes it’s the hospital staff that needs a chaplain’s support.”
She’s too late. They already left for the day. She makes a mental note of the best time to visit so she doesn’t miss them when she returns.
The background image is A close-up of a woman’s forearm shows a tattoo shaped like an ornate cross.
The day shift: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
3:27 p.m.
A call comes in about a 75-year-old male who suffered a stroke. Scott waits in the hallway for Life Lion to bring him in.
The medical crew wheels the gurney down the hallway, stopping outside the door to the CT scan machine.
Scott joins the small huddle and gets the information she needs, completing her chaplain information sheet.
Continuing reading: Night shift