April 4, 2008

Friday, April 04, 2008

Making the Coffee

Work is crazy on the weekdays. The phones are ringing off the hook, people are sneaking through the door, and people need stuff. I volunteered to work today since my coworker is sick. I don’t know how she does it- thank GOD for my weekend hours. It’s seriously a different place on the weekends. Speaking of work- A lot of you know that people routinely die on this unit, since a lot of our patients have suffered a brain tumor, stroke or hemorrhage. When this happens I sometimes have a hard time knowing what my role is. I’m just the secretary and my job isn’t to do anything having to do with hands on patient care. However, I do interact quite a lot with families. I recently read something that gave me some perspective on this issue, in Losing Moses on the Freeway, Chris Hedges mentions asking his father, a Presbyterian Minister, what he says to bereaving families:

I asked him once when I was a teenager what he said to bereaved families when he went to the farmhouses after the funerals of loved ones. Surely, I thought, even my father with his close proximity to disease and death and grief would have some wisdom to impart."
"Mostly," he answered, "I make the coffee."

I had some disdain for his answer then, but I honor it now. There is little to do in the face of death but make the coffee. We have no words to blunt its awfulness. It was his presence, more than anything he could say, which mattered.

Ok.. So, I don’t make the (literal) coffee. I was thinking about lobbying for a coffee maker and some other things to make the family conference room (where we let families of dying patients hang out a lot of times) more cozy, but I heard that we will be converting that room back into a patient room- so, there’s really no use. But, yeah… just being there, I need to remember that.
To keep doting on Hedges, I am reading my third book by him; I Don’t Believe in Atheists! It’s totally changing the way I look at religion, war and my fellow activist community. It doesn’t attack people that have earned their Atheism by any means, but attacks fundamentalist atheists that try to rally people into the mythological belief in some kind of "utopia" achieved through a false faith in the evolution of human morality. Does that make sense? It really is changing how I look at things. Several months ago, I was a little quicker to dismiss religion, in a broad sense, as an institution that creates walls between people and helps spark silly wars. I’ve always respected people that do good works, whether in the name of GOD or otherwise, but I always glorified the people who didn’t need GOD as somehow more independently strong, but I realize that I was a little naive of me. There are so many questions (you know, the basics, "why are we here?" "Is there anything bigger out there?") and transcendental experiences that people face, that science cannot begin to explain. I guess this book is making me respect religion in a way I never did before and showing me the potential dangers and errors of believing that eradicating religion, and asserting our moral prowess will make for a better, more peaceful world, when in fact, the opposite is true. So, yeah.. I have a new favorite author.

In other news, my eyes are fucked. I went to the Optometrist yesterday and it was kind of an ordeal. My eyes were WAY more sensitive to light than they should have been. This could be a side effect of the antibiotics I was taking, but it seems unlikely. This sensitivity made it almost impossible for the doctor to conduct her exam, which made me feel obligated to apologize profusely although there wasn’t much I could do about it. I also could tell that I was annoying the hell out of the doctor and that made me feel even worse. At any rate, the blood vessels in my eyes are swollen (for some reason??) so she put me on these steroid eye drops for the next week. I also threw all my old contacts away. Next week when the eye drop treatment is done, hopefully my eyes will be healthy and I’ll start on a new brand of contacts and a…. humph, more intense prescription. Yes, my eyes have worsened over the past 2 years, but the doctor tells me I’m at the age that they should stop changing—so we’ll see. Hopefully, my eyeballs will be happy once again next week.

There isn’t too much else going on. My belly still hurts from time to time, but less than in previous weeks. I have a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday- so hopefully they’ll figure out what’s wrong with me.

Zine stuff is good. It should be on shelves by May 1st, I’ll keep you posted!