But we have poverty of our own.  Our destitution is not as glaringly obvious, but every bit as demoralizing. Every day I meet patients who are buried under mounds of medical debt, dependant on the government to reimburse the hospital for the expenses they incurred. Patients I treat daily who may not know where their next meal is coming from or how they will afford medications.  I treated a patient last week who had not been seen by a primary physician in 7 years because he did not have insurance. He spent two weeks with us, seriously ill with multiple organ dysfunction, body crippled from years of neglect. I regularly discharge patients I know will see again soon, simply because I know they will not be able to afford to stay on the medications needed to keep them alive.  Patients who wait until their illness becomes life-threatening to come in for treatment, because they fear the astronomical bills that will continue to pile up. Bodies filled up with unhealthy foods, over-worked and under-rested, stress-dominated life-styles. Cycles of life-style decisions feeding rampant epidemics of diseases, coronary artery disease, diabetes, peripheral vascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; all products of poverty driven decisions.  Poverty of pocket and of heart. People smoke because they are stressed. People are stressed because they are either working too much or not enough. Smoking leads to multiple diseases I treat every day. But I cannot say if I lived through the some of the same situations that many of my patients do, I might not smoke to cope too. I treated a patient last week who dealt with a chronic lung disease attributed most often to long-term smoking. She also struggled with chronic pain and anxiety that she took piles of medications to control.   She had gone through an abusive marriage, terrible divorce that left her bankrupt, and was currently living with family who were verbally abusive and neglectful.  She had no money, no where to go, and was stuck in an unhealthy living situation, all the while crippled by disease. Mid-sixties, she just felt like she would be better off dead. Poverty at its worst: a heart without hope.

            I hate dealing with the money and budget side of healthcare. But it cannot be avoided. I work for a not-for-profit organization, with roots dating back to nuns who served alongside Florence Nightingale, committed to helping the poor and underserved. We treat everyone. Our doors are open to the lost and broken, the uninsured and homeless, the neglected and marginalized. But money still worms its way into our conversations and attitudes. And I wrestle every day in the tension. The tension of conserving resources and saving money and being a responsible steward, and seeing stories of people in need and wanting to give with abandon knowing there will never be enough to go around. For nurses at the bedside the tension comes with numbers, numbers of bodies in beds. Our tension is birthed when bodies become numbers. When faces and stories become bills and minutes on a clock. Quick to the next and the next, assess and treat and get them out the door, there are more waiting. The faster the better, we start to feel more like factory workers producing products on a line than healers caring for human hearts and bodies. Confronted with vast need, I see my own poverty, my own nakedness. All the passion and energy and smiles in the world, will never be enough to fix it all.

I need hope. Hope that the bodies I touch feel valued, even in the rush. Hope that my limited resources poured into an ocean of need actually make a difference. Hope that a smile, a touch, an extra minute given that I can barely spare, can comfort, can spark healing. Hope that the desperate prayers I shoot up in crisis are heard. And answered. By the Author of life. By the Giver of all hope. 

No family came up to visit while she was an inpatient, several of them had their own serious health issues, but regardless, Jane was pretty much alone. Our staff became an odd family of sorts. When Christmas came around, there was a Christmas present with her name on it under our short plastic tree at the front desk.  But Christmas was like any other day for Jane. Just like many patients in the hospital, Christmas didn’t change anything. It was just another day. Another day she was stuck away from home, away from familiarity, away from where her life made sense. Even though she didn’t recognize us from day to day, she became family to us. Even though her memory failed her, we greeted her every morning like a close acquaintance. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, they were all the same at the hospital. People still get sick and die. People are still hungry and needy and painful and life’s joys and tragedies go on like any other day.

But even though it seemed like she didn’t know the difference from one day to another, as Christmas approached, she seemed happier, more upbeat, more hopeful. She started walking in the hallways, smiling, giggling a bit. Her daily struggle to figure out where she was and what was happening gradually eased as the unfamiliar became strangely familiar. And she got to open presents on Christmas. Just a little wrapped gift under a fake tree, but she loved it. We had hung stars in her room with jimmy-rigged oxygen tubing and found some old red and green garland to make it feel more joyful and festive, and she loved it. Made me think of this quote, “Hope is a great thing. Maybe the best of things, and good things never die.”

i want to write what is true in me. original. unaffected. unaltered. unadulterated.
maybe one word at a time. one thought. one idea. one moment. not for anyone. or to anyone. just offer up what i see and hear. and not worry. about how people might respond. or not.
but this is something i dont want to just think about. masticate on indefinitely. i want to move on it. into it. grab hold. and chase it. dig in. sink my teeth. fight.
risk something. invest something. i dont want to have this self-inflated prophet complex, i dont believe necessarily that what i have to say will change the world…but i do believe that God has put a thing in me that would be right for me to offer.

i want to create as a reflection of a Great Creator…reflecting His depth of wisdom and wit and insight and truth.

i want to bring healing. hope. restoration. redemption. bring the Kingdom near.

to open eyes to SEE.

{what i want it to be}

i want it to be an honest reflection. of what i see. who i meet. what i am taught. what i wrestle with. and maybe in that wresting, invite others to grapple and enter. i want it to be fresh. raw. real. honest. genuine. an honest overflow of thoughts and emotions and questions that stem from time with God and people. about hurt. healing. anger. disappointment. addiction. freedom. suffering. joy. gratitude. about the coverup.  of these layers. that hide stories. the layers of fear. and doubt. and loneliness. and brokenness. that are buried of piles of cover-ups. i want to help peel those layers, those cover-ups back…to see people as they really are. in their nakedness. in my nakedness. to discover and tell the real stories hidden, buried, and unheard.

so here it starts. to unfold. will start to post chapter excerpts from my book.

“naked {hope}.”

Yellow florescent lights run in tracks along the ceiling down the hallway in straight lines, stark incandescence highlights each body with equal harshness.  Busy blurs move along under those lighted tracks like cars in the fast lane on a busy highway at rush hour. In and out of rooms, some stopping at mounted wall computers like stop-lights, squinting at and punching out numbers. White coats, white papers, white shoes, white faces. Busy business to be done by all.

The slow lane lumbers along beside with the stop-and-go shuffle of walker traffic. Each inching painfully along, blue slipper steps alternating between aluminum walker legs, dragging beeping poles and swinging bags of colored juices behind.  Some with spindly spider legs fragilely supporting the bird body up above, some with weeble-wobble noodle legs wavering uncertainly, some with swollen tree-trunk limbs stiff shuffle thumping, but all achieving wondrous success by merely standing on those two legs and moving one foot in front of the other.

Sharp left-handed turn into room 704, red cardiac monitor alarms blinking like traffic lights ahead.  Naked white lump of flesh tied up in a tangled mess of red, green, white, brown, black wires wiggling every which direction from under piles of white stiff hospital blankets. Iridescent blue veins stand-out barely covered by paper-thin tissue-paper white skin, while wiry bony fingers pull and fuss, trying unsuccessfully to break free from the wired mess.  Pleasantly confused naked bodies, let calm coaxing helping hands straighten and organize cords and tubes, boost and fluff and re-tuck. Red call light placed in laps with reminders, while loud coughing and beeps erupt from next door.

Mr. 705. Brisk busy steps in a professional rush to the next crisis. Hunched over, sweat streaming, each rasp of a breath sounding and looking labored and desperate; it’s another naked body needing air. Phone calls, doctors paged, new tubes, the hiss of high-flow oxygen titration, another body boost up, a body unable to sit up on their own to get air into lungs. Now: coach the breathing, slow down, talk down the breathless hysteria. Morphine and Ativan IV push STAT from the medication Pyxis rushed back to the room, a saline flush squirted into the air spraying a cool mist onto the flushed naked face.  Smiling face doesn’t let scared body see stress or worry or urgency.  Hand on shoulder, lips to ear, coaching and calming, breath-by-breath reassurance until two sets of lungs, two mouths, two bodies breathing as one. Slow. Even. Perfusion. Ventilation. Oxygenation. The surrounding chaos outside frozen in time, the only real moment is this; eyes connecting, breathing slowing, a calm transferred, until oxygen exchange is successful.

Phone blast.  Re-enter hall traffic, cut-through phone calls and buzz at the desk, dodging stretchers coming and going, loaded with undiagnosed bodies headed to tests determining fates.  Multiple IV beeps blaring from multiple rooms interrupt any hallway navigation.

Ms. 719. code brown. Rigid obtunded naked body covered in brown. Stool everywhere; shoulders to toes. Log-rolling resistant unbending limbs, warm white washcloths drip soap-suds all over the naked soiled body, stiffly unaware, blissfully oblivious to her naked exposure. Judge Judy’s constant background blabbing blocking buzz from the conflict two rooms over. Blue latex-free gloves scrubbing red raw excoriated skin with careful methodical precision. Fresh white sheets tucked and folded with puffs of white powder layered between skin and bed. Perfectly propped pillows, call it good; at least for the next two hours. Deep sigh. Knock on the next door.

Ms. 721 screams. “Help! Will someone please help me?! They have taken my purse and I am late to the theatre!”  Confusion hanging thick in the air, no logic or reason welcome here. Bright red lipstick and brown painted eyebrows pop awkwardly from pale white bony cheeks, moving in unnatural frenzied wiggles as she frantically searched the room, trying to make sense of something in her perplexed non-reality. Pink finger-nails a nostalgic link, connecting to another world far far away, a place that only existed in her head. Hands held. Concern heard. Medication given. Try only a half-dose of xanax tonight. And more busy wash-clothes to fold.

Garbled words spilled out of his mouth like Suessical marbles, but his eyes spoke quite fluently.  Hatred that wasn’t directed at me, but at the fact that he and I were both alive. An Old Yeller–ish crazed fear, not of death, but of life. Fear that he was going to endure another day of living hell, trapped inside a broken body, unable to move his own limbs or verbally articulate his own thoughts. It took me most of the day, but once I learned to understand the language of his eyes, I heard more of his story.

A friend once told me that I could hold an intimate conversation with a tree; true about me, very true. I didn’t need response from him to dig deep into his heart. He was pissed when I first walked in and threw open the dark shades flooding the stark white hospital room with warm natural sunlight. Glaring at me from across the room as if he were tossing daggers straight through my annoying smile, my upbeat stream of excited thoughts and ideas for his day as noxious as acid to his livid stony countenance, I am sure that if looks could kill, I would have been deader than a random pathetic rapscallion attempting to take on Bruce Willis. Working hard, I would put my ear a hair’s width from his red lips, listening, asking for repeats over and over, working hard to make sense of each painfully formed word. Like a student studying a new language with each garbled utterance needing translation, I pulled hard, trying to extract the story buried in him. Frustrated, he would often give up even trying to make me understand what he was feeling or attempting to communicate, and slip into sultry stubborn silence, his escape, his safe home.  But I am stubborn too. And I kept pulling. And smiling. And asking. And letting the sun in.

I wondered, as I touched his body. Touched his red skin, when was the last time he felt love. Felt love in a touch. Felt home. Felt wanted. Seen. Known. Remembered. Valued. Wondered, as I watched his stiff angry reactive red body slowly relax, if I, a strange woman in a hospital giving him a bed-bath, was the closest encounter he had with love. With touch. In a long time.  An angry red quadriplegic man with severe expressive dysphasia, alone in his 30’s. A hopeless case. Surrounded by and absolutely dependent on paid-workers for everything that touches him, food, movement, speech, everything. Who touches him? Who listens? Who fights for him when he doesn’t have the strength to fight for himself? Would he live out the remainder of his life lovelessly lonely?

He remained absolutely flinty in his stoicism. I remained absolutely all smiles in my fountain of hope. And fought him in a bizarre battle for breakthrough. Swinging hope madly above my head like a sword. Wildly hacking away at the wall of stone around his red heart. Refusing to let his suicidal red win.  Smiles and sun smothered by his smoky glower, I swear I caught a glimpse of a slight break in his wall after I bounced in the next day, when a slippery subtle curve tugged the edges of those firm red lines of his.  Laughing and talking about movies and music and making fun of him for liking Prince, spilling joy like an exploding two liter of Coke freshly shaken, my hands washing away his bitterness with warm wet white washcloths on his flaming red skin, he lost. Broke. Couldn’t resist any longer. By the end of the day, he was smiling, joking even, as I held his hand and talked about the next day’s plan for discharge. He surprised me. He was funny. And clever. And intelligent. And I would have never known.

There are a few patients whose faces and stories are etched deep in me. So strange the deep intimate connections I have with complete strangers. Washing his naked suicidal red body, hands all over his forgotten limp limbs, sharing sacred moments with a strange man I would probably never see again, I passionately fought for him to feel worth something. To feel valuable. Even just for those few short days, if he never did again…to feel and experience what it felt like to be alive, and not regret the fact that he was.  He was sent out to an outpatient therapy center for the severely depressed and actively suicidal patients.  Red fingers dwarfing mine in a death-grip, I had to pry myself from his grasp as the stretcher took him away. One more smile spilled out as I leaned in and whispered, my lips touching his red ear, “You are going to make it. You are worth it. You have so much to offer. I wont forget you.” Excited and in a rush, I couldn’t understand the last thing he whispered frantically back into my ear. He said it over and over again, but I didn’t get it until after he was gone.

Laying in bed that night, his red skin and red face in my mind, I googled the phrase I thought I heard him say, “I would die for you…”

And this is what I found…never knew a Prince song could make me cry.

I Would Die for You

Prince

All I really need is to know that
you believe…
Yeah, I would die for you, yeah
Darling if you want me to
you – I would die for you
No need to worry

No need to cry

Be your fire when you’re cold

Make you happy when you’re sad

Yeah, I would die for you…

Funny, the dramatic impact of a few drops of love on a dry unloved heart.

The THEYS are people. They are creatures created with purpose. And love. And thought. And hope. And meaning. Everyone of those THEMS. Those naked I serve. And see.

Not one giant blob of a nemesis that manufactures a paycheck for me every two weeks. Not a giant glob of humanity that consists of cookie-cutter shaped oompa-loompa bodies filling beds, blank minds, blank faces; but people. Each bump and bulge and wart and drop of blood and epithelial cell distinctive. Each naked lump of flesh inimitable and worth seeing. Worth seeing because each they is created in the image of a him. A Creator who painstakingly shaped. And formed. And expressed Himself in the faces of the thems.

And I think the second I find myself in the world of theys and thems, I lose my soul. I lose my sight. Become blind. Gripping the counter after the door clapped shut behind her, pity hit. Pity and compassion. Compassion and vehement words. We don’t need healthcare reform. We need to see again.  We need to see hope in each in face. Each body. Each room. Each them. Each they. The second I start they and them dropping, I stop seeing the beauty hidden in each curmudgeon-y creature.

“Carrie” was not a them ignorant and illiterate with a blank mind and face, she was a simply happy woman who consistently resiliently bounced back from all the shit the world had thrown in her life.

“Harriet” was not a they addicted to attention and pain meds, she was a woman who was bed-ridden, body and soul broken, lonely and desperately needing to feel loved and remembered and seen.

“Don” was not a they to be talked about as if his ashen blistered silent face dripping with sweat and fear was devoid of personhood.

I don’t want to be a them dropper. I want to see. I want to help others break out of blindness, to see, not as I see, but as He does.

And I am beginning to think that is why. Why I write. Why I am writing. This book. To bring some sight to the blind. Just as much of a fight to have my own blind eye see, as to open wide eyes around me. See through darkness. And faintness of hopeless hearts. And politics. And money. And cynicism and bitterness.  There is this verse in Isaiah that goes like this, “He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners…” In Hebrew, that word for release literally means “the opening of eyes, wide”.

But I don’t think this just applies to me, I think this is for all of us. That we are all sent to help each other remember to see, to open wide eyes, of those around us who are imprisoned, by our own darkness, blindness.

if you know me, even little bits of me, you know i am full to the brim of ideas. all the time. talk about all sorts of great things and ideas that i want to do and pursue…and 9.5 times out of 10, i do nothing with them.  vapor. smoke. they all come and go. i get excited for like a day and then suddenly stop what i am doing because some new shiny thing distracts me and i start something else. the good thing about being extremely distractible, mildly ADD, and idea-hounded (even in my sleep)…is that i am never bored. i am a great starter. however, the down-side of me is that i rarely follow-up, follow-through, or finish anything i start. i find that i need extreme levels of accountability to keep me on track…i ran a marathon only because a friend signed-up and posted on facebook that she was excited about running it with me. i am training for a triathlon only because i announced it to people at work. apparently mass-public accountability is the only thing that keeps me on track.

so, all that introspective mush to say, thought it might work for my next project…

(insert drum-roll) i am writing a book. for real. i feel like everyone and their mom has thought about writing a book or talked about writing a book or started writing a book…but this is legit. i forked over my life savings, signed a contract, hired an amazing editor/coach, and am on a timeline of having a completed book by the summer.

there. i did it. taking baby-steps on this journey of learning to be one who can finish what she starts…thanks for helping.

keep me from fluttering about religion; fix me firm in it, for i am irresolute; my decisions are smoke and vapour, and i do not glorify thee, or behave according to thy will;

cut me not off before my thoughts grow to responses, and the budding of my soul into full flower,

for thou art forbearing and good, patient and kind.

save me from myself…i have acted as if i hated thee, although thou art love itself; i have contrived to tempt thee to the uttermost, to wear out thy patience; have lived evilly in word and action.

had i been a prince i would long ago have crushed such a rebel; had i been a father i would long since have rejected my child.

o, thou father of my spirit, thou king of my life, cast me not into destruction, drive me not from thy presence, but wound my heart that it may be healed; break it that thine own hand may make it whole.” -valley of vision-

rough life, i know. but i am enjoying one of the best (and most ridiculous) vacations a girl could ask for…with two of my dearest friends. feels quite unreal. crazy…to be so blessed.

so i started wondering a bit about gratitude, while dipping my toes in the ocean under the stars. what does it mean to live as a grateful person? what would it mean to really express gratitude to those in my life…i am so quick to use words. to thank. to fill a void or make a point…but i dont just want to offer empty words of gratitude. i feel true gratitude must require more. more an orientation of the heart, a shifting of paradigms. an oozing of conviction that starts with a decision deep inside. a choice to see the world around for the good and the beauty and the joy…regardless of poolside vacations or heartache and betrayal.

so, i am grateful for my ridiculously lavish vacation, but i am also grateful for long exhausting days at the hospital, failures, dead basil plants, disaster cracker recipes, and sleeping through alarms. for friends who go through hell and still know how to laugh, for friends who have overcome crazy life-obstacles and still know how to love…

and for the pool i am about to go jump into…