I Don't Get It

EMS brought another dead body to the hospital tonight. That's two in a week that I know of.

Someone finds a loved one in the house. They call 911: good idea! 911 sends an ambulance: good idea! The ambulance arrives to find that the person is without pulse, has been so for 10 or more minutes, and is gray, so they begin CPR, plug them full of meds, and zap them. Then EMS loads the person into the ambulance and races off, even though there has been no response: Um, waste of time idea? Then EMS arrives at the hospital, unloads the dead body (while still doing CPR and cramming every medication imaginable into it), and our ER staff calls a Code Blue and goes to work: Wait, I'm lost.

At this point they've been dead a half hour. Or more. What, exactly, are we trying to accomplish here? If God wanted this person revived, the ER staff is no better at performing miracles than the EMS were. That's up to God. So why exactly is one of the nurses standing over the body doing chest compressions? We knew they were dead on arrival...

Pointless Questions

I wondered tonight how many of the questions I ask people are pointless. As a chaplain, I have found that many of my questions seem to be pointless. The reasons may vary, but tonight I concluded that many questions I ask, to give myself some idea of what the situation may be, are pointless because people give me answers that are not true.

I'm not saying people lie to me, though of course that happens too. Tonight, I asked a family a question I often ask: is there anyone else coming in, any other family or friends? I think I've seen other people ask this too, including nurses and doctors. I do it so I can get an idea of what to expect: are you the only decision maker? Is your schedule the only one that matters? Are we waiting for someone to come before we contact the morgue or "withdraw care?"

So I asked: Is there any other family coming in? The response: No, we're it. We told the grandkids not to come up, and the in-laws can help us tomorrow. Then, 20 minutes later, another child of the patient shows up. With his wife. That would be, yes, two people, not none, who came later. Understandable then why I would give the nurse a confused look when she was about to usher them into an occupied waiting room, and why the son was confused as to why I was confused.

So why bother asking, I ask myself? Another pointless question, because I'll ask again next time, too.

Recursive Dreams

This morning I had a hard time waking up. I kept snoozing my alarm clock, and would struggle to wake up only to feel my eyes shut and I would fall back asleep. I sat up and picked up my Bible, to try and start my morning reading and start getting up that way. My eyes kept drooping, and I couldn't stay awake. It was just so hard to wake up!

Then I woke up. My Bible was where I had put it the night before. I was lying in bed with the covers pulled up.

In the midst of not being able to wake up, I had dreamt about not being able to wake up!

I remember thinking that the book I was reading wasn't familiar to me, "Memory" or something like that. But somehow my dream-thoughts tried to make sense of that.