Word: chaplain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hospital never goes to sleep: the robot in the pharmacy dispenses drugs 24 hours a day with nearly 100% accuracy; a chaplain dozes in the sleeping room, with a beeper; doctors work late into the night, and residents rotate overnight duty every three nights, crashing on couches in the lounge and grabbing snacks from vending machines after the cafeteria closes...
Baker is a chaplain, a new one. Chaplains train at DUMC much as doctors do. There are interns like Baker, residents, supervisors and administrators. But while medical interns spend years in painstaking study of death's repertoire of plague, bone break and bodily corruption, the chaplaincy interns are Duke Divinity School students. They learn...
...tall, with solemn, deep blue eyes and a wispy Vandyke. A divinity grad student from Roxie, Miss., he has spent his first two weeks here on a ward that has thus far seen no deaths. But tonight, from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., he is the on-call chaplain for the entire hospital. In his pocket is a sky-blue beeper that will sound the moment someone's vital signs fail. He wonders how he will respond. Last night's on-call was faced with the death of an eight-year-old boy mangled by dogs. "I don't know...
...here with an uncle. Exploratory surgery has just shown that he's riddled with cancer and has perhaps four months to live. When he wakes, they will tell him. Baker asks if he can help. Not just now, the family says gently. Later he will write neatly in the chaplain's log that tomorrow "family and patient may need to verbalize this matter...
Baker is back in the chaplain's sleeping room, a monk's cell with a TV on gimbals. He left the Southern Baptists but eventually found God again in Methodism, which he felt downplayed sin in favor of God's grace. In Baker's theology, illness and death are not divine punishment on one woman for her weaknesses but rather a symptom of our collective distance from God. Our first disobedience let chaos into our world: chaos can be human sin; it can be a genetic predisposition for cancer. We are all shattered vessels, and death must come...