walking in the garden
^ read.
be floored, be blessed
and read it again:
Walking in the Garden
by Ann E. Dominguez
Lately I’ve been wondering why I'm in medicine — or at least, I've been wondering how to get out of medicine. I have two young boys who seem to need me home so much, and the challenge of juggling their needs, my husband’s needs, and my needs with my patients' need to have a physician available to them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, is truly impossible. At any given time, I am letting somebody — often several people — down. But more than that, I find medicine exhausting. I'm not talking about the fights with the HMOs, or the hours, or the fear of being sued. I'm talking about the suffering.
I am a doctor in a Community Health Center, and most of my patients are Mexican immigrants. Many speak little or no English; their jobs — if they are lucky enough still to have them in the current economic slump — provide no health insurance or benefits. The pay is dismal. Many of them work six or seven days a week, twelve hour days, doing things that I would find mind-numbingly boring if I were doing them even an hour a day. Most of my patients suffer from poverty. A large proportion of my patients suffer from depression, anxiety, alcoholism, or domestic violence...on top of their diabetes, hypertension, chronic pain, and heart disease.
I believe that a great deal of the healing in any doctor-patient relationship comes from naming the pain. I believe in talking about suffering, about the real issues: is it José's blurry vision that causes him to suffer with his diabetes or the fear of going blind after watching his mother lose her vision, feet, and kidneys? Is it Guadalupe's sciatica making this pregnancy so difficult or the fact that her two children are still in Mexico and she has not seen them for three years? Is Carol suffering because of her back pain or because her fourteen year-old son ran away with a gang in November? Is George's pain from his old gunshot wound or from the hole left in his heart by his wife's unfaithfulness?
When my patients come to see me, I loathe giving them just a pill. I want them to know the healing that comes from Christ's presence, from the wholeness that he can give despite diabetes, despite sciatica, despite back pain. But to offer this healing, I need to enter into the garden of their suffering with them.
My work is exhausting. When I am working full-time, I go for stretches of time without the creative energy to write, to make music, to quilt...and yet these are the very activities that renew me. As a physician, I am inundated by articles giving me ways to address my "burnout." These suggestions often include taking time for me and engaging in creative activities. But when I am worn out from sorrow on behalf of my patients, I can hardly eat my dinner, let alone write in my journal.
For a time, I thought that I was exhausted by the demands of having an active two-year-old son, a husband working eighty hours a week, and a full-time job. When my second son was born, however, I took a four-month maternity leave. I was sleeping very little, nursing all the time, and caring for my family; yet I had a surge of creative energy. All the energy I had been pouring into my patients' lives, into sharing their suffering, I could use to quilt, write, dance, and sing, despite my physical fatigue. And I was finally able to identify the source of my exhaustion: sin. All day at work, I am surrounded by — steeped in — the effect of sin on God’s creatures, and it is exhausting.
This Lenten season, we are preparing to move across the country. We will be changing homes, communities, churches, and jobs. I have been looking for work — hopefully still with the poor, and hopefully still in a community of immigrants — but part-time. I am finding it difficult to find a part-time job. Why hire a part-time doctor, when you could have a workaholic? We workaholic doctors are a dime a dozen — why settle for less? And as a job that would fit with my family's needs seems to be hard to find, I have given God fifty good reasons why now is the time for me to take a break. It's time to leave medicine...probably not forever, but for a season. I have been asking him to give me a season of creative energy at home with my sons, with my husband, and with my church.
Then Monday night during my prenatal care clinic, I was thinking about getting home early so I could see my husband before he fell asleep. Mondays are my long day, though this one — so far — had been lighter than most. I had gotten a lot done and was thinking I could finish my charts quickly. And then I went in to see Maria, and the night changed completely.
Maria is an easy-going mother of three sons, and she is now four months pregnant. This pregnancy has been harder than her last, mostly because her youngest is less than one, and still nursing. In that way, we are alike: I, too, am pregnant and nursed my youngest through the first half of this pregnancy, until he turned one last month. I like seeing Maria. But tonight we could not find the baby’s heartbeat with my hand-held Doppler. Sometimes at this stage, I reassured her, it's hard to hear because the baby is less stationary than at twelve weeks, when we first heard it just above her pubic bone; yet the baby is still small, so we have to listen at just the right spot. Praying silently for God to save this baby, I led her to another room so we could check with the ultrasound. There he was, an apparently perfect little boy, about the right size for sixteen weeks...perfect except that his heart was not beating.
My first thought: there goes my early night. My second thought: you selfish person. My third thought: what now? So Maria and I treaded lightly through what had to be said: this is very hard. We have a few options. No, we don’t know why this happened. It is nothing you did. Maria chose to wait overnight, since going through the delivery late at night in our busy inner-city hospital could only make the nightmare worse. We planned that I would meet her in the hospital in the morning. Shaken, she — and eventually I — went home.
We met at eight the next morning on the obstetrical floor. It only took me an hour to arrange for her official ultrasound, which we watched together in silence. Then while she waited silently with her mother in the waiting room, I tried to arrange a bed for her. Our hospital is big and does not run smoothly — it is a good place to be if you have been shot, but for many other ailments, it is far from ideal. I tried being reasonable and explaining the reasons why I wanted her on the obstetrical floor while I induced her labor; I begged on her behalf and appealed to the nurses' sympathy. At one o'clock, they finally told me there was no way they would accept her on the obstetrical floor because her pregnancy had not made it to halfway: this is the policy, they told me. They promised me a bed for her on the medical floor as soon as possible. Promising Maria I would come back at the end of the afternoon, I went to the clinic to see patients.
At 5:30 pm, I went to the hospital and discovered that Maria had just moved into her room. She informed me that she had received her IV but had not been given any medicine yet. She gave me a brave smile and tried to console me in my obvious frustration. Perhaps I should have sent her through the ER the night before — at least her physical ordeal would have been over by now. Instead, she had waited eight hours without eating (nor had she eaten since leaving my clinic last night, as I feared she might need to go to surgery) without a room, and we still did not know when her baby would be born. I spent only half an hour with Maria then; we talked about how the medicine would affect her body, what the cramping would be like, and what her baby might look like when he was eventually born. Then she told me to go home to my family for dinner.
I returned to the hospital for a different delivery around one in the morning. I dropped into Maria's room on my way upstairs; she was sleeping. I asked her mother to have me paged when she awoke. Around 3:30 am, the nurse called me, and I went down to see Maria. We talked and cried again about this little life within her which had so quickly ended; we talked about how the pains are often worse with this type of labor, because there is nothing — meaning no baby to cuddle, to nurse, to celebrate — to look forward to. At 4:10 am, Jesus was born. I was with Maria, and we cradled his little body in our hands. His skull had a small fracture above his left eyebrow from the delivery; otherwise, he was perfect. We wept, and we baptized him.
So many times with a delivery of an already-dead baby, the baby comes without warning. It is born into the bed; the mother is alone; it is frightening, and often dangerous to the mother because of the bleeding that can ensue if the afterbirth doesn’t follow quickly. Yet Maria's delivery, despite our impossible hospital, despite being on the medical floor with one nurse to ten patients, was the best it could have been. And I know that by God's grace, he used me to make it better. This was my answer, I knew: no, Ann, you may not leave the garden. Stay here and keep watch with me. Pray that you will not fall into temptation.
Friday night, we went to dinner and a Lenten Taize service with some friends. After dinner, I told our friend Scott that maybe I was asking God the wrong question. He said he thought I was asking the right question but didn't like the answer. At the service, the candles we lit and placed at the altar reflected their light back to us from the shining marble. The cross, draped in purple, was balanced on its side like Jesus, fallen on the Via Dolorosa and caught by one hand. The Scripture, from Matthew 26, read, "My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done." I wept.
Sunday morning, we celebrated Palm Sunday, the Triumphal Entry. Our whole church waited at the top of the drive for the procession to come, singing, up the hill. We waved our palms. We sang. The wine and the bread were carried after the cross, today with a small bouquet of yellow tulips on it. My son squealed with delight when his three-year-old friend danced by us in the procession. We shouted, "Hosanna!" At the end of the service, girls with banners danced at the front of the church, and my son and I watched them from the front row. He clapped and laughed with joy; I wept more. We sang, "Hail to the King / in all your splendor and majesty" (Larry Hampton, "Hail to the King").
Finally, my spirit was willing, though my flesh is still weak. While Christ labors here in the garden, while he suffers with what evil does in our world, in our city, in our lives, while Christ is sorrowful and troubled until we are all free and can all worship him in his splendor and majesty — I will keep watch with him in the garden. I will drink this cup of suffering with his creatures. Not as I will, but as you will.
be floored, be blessed
and read it again:
Walking in the Garden
by Ann E. Dominguez
Lately I’ve been wondering why I'm in medicine — or at least, I've been wondering how to get out of medicine. I have two young boys who seem to need me home so much, and the challenge of juggling their needs, my husband’s needs, and my needs with my patients' need to have a physician available to them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, is truly impossible. At any given time, I am letting somebody — often several people — down. But more than that, I find medicine exhausting. I'm not talking about the fights with the HMOs, or the hours, or the fear of being sued. I'm talking about the suffering.
I am a doctor in a Community Health Center, and most of my patients are Mexican immigrants. Many speak little or no English; their jobs — if they are lucky enough still to have them in the current economic slump — provide no health insurance or benefits. The pay is dismal. Many of them work six or seven days a week, twelve hour days, doing things that I would find mind-numbingly boring if I were doing them even an hour a day. Most of my patients suffer from poverty. A large proportion of my patients suffer from depression, anxiety, alcoholism, or domestic violence...on top of their diabetes, hypertension, chronic pain, and heart disease.
I believe that a great deal of the healing in any doctor-patient relationship comes from naming the pain. I believe in talking about suffering, about the real issues: is it José's blurry vision that causes him to suffer with his diabetes or the fear of going blind after watching his mother lose her vision, feet, and kidneys? Is it Guadalupe's sciatica making this pregnancy so difficult or the fact that her two children are still in Mexico and she has not seen them for three years? Is Carol suffering because of her back pain or because her fourteen year-old son ran away with a gang in November? Is George's pain from his old gunshot wound or from the hole left in his heart by his wife's unfaithfulness?
When my patients come to see me, I loathe giving them just a pill. I want them to know the healing that comes from Christ's presence, from the wholeness that he can give despite diabetes, despite sciatica, despite back pain. But to offer this healing, I need to enter into the garden of their suffering with them.
My work is exhausting. When I am working full-time, I go for stretches of time without the creative energy to write, to make music, to quilt...and yet these are the very activities that renew me. As a physician, I am inundated by articles giving me ways to address my "burnout." These suggestions often include taking time for me and engaging in creative activities. But when I am worn out from sorrow on behalf of my patients, I can hardly eat my dinner, let alone write in my journal.
For a time, I thought that I was exhausted by the demands of having an active two-year-old son, a husband working eighty hours a week, and a full-time job. When my second son was born, however, I took a four-month maternity leave. I was sleeping very little, nursing all the time, and caring for my family; yet I had a surge of creative energy. All the energy I had been pouring into my patients' lives, into sharing their suffering, I could use to quilt, write, dance, and sing, despite my physical fatigue. And I was finally able to identify the source of my exhaustion: sin. All day at work, I am surrounded by — steeped in — the effect of sin on God’s creatures, and it is exhausting.
This Lenten season, we are preparing to move across the country. We will be changing homes, communities, churches, and jobs. I have been looking for work — hopefully still with the poor, and hopefully still in a community of immigrants — but part-time. I am finding it difficult to find a part-time job. Why hire a part-time doctor, when you could have a workaholic? We workaholic doctors are a dime a dozen — why settle for less? And as a job that would fit with my family's needs seems to be hard to find, I have given God fifty good reasons why now is the time for me to take a break. It's time to leave medicine...probably not forever, but for a season. I have been asking him to give me a season of creative energy at home with my sons, with my husband, and with my church.
Then Monday night during my prenatal care clinic, I was thinking about getting home early so I could see my husband before he fell asleep. Mondays are my long day, though this one — so far — had been lighter than most. I had gotten a lot done and was thinking I could finish my charts quickly. And then I went in to see Maria, and the night changed completely.
Maria is an easy-going mother of three sons, and she is now four months pregnant. This pregnancy has been harder than her last, mostly because her youngest is less than one, and still nursing. In that way, we are alike: I, too, am pregnant and nursed my youngest through the first half of this pregnancy, until he turned one last month. I like seeing Maria. But tonight we could not find the baby’s heartbeat with my hand-held Doppler. Sometimes at this stage, I reassured her, it's hard to hear because the baby is less stationary than at twelve weeks, when we first heard it just above her pubic bone; yet the baby is still small, so we have to listen at just the right spot. Praying silently for God to save this baby, I led her to another room so we could check with the ultrasound. There he was, an apparently perfect little boy, about the right size for sixteen weeks...perfect except that his heart was not beating.
My first thought: there goes my early night. My second thought: you selfish person. My third thought: what now? So Maria and I treaded lightly through what had to be said: this is very hard. We have a few options. No, we don’t know why this happened. It is nothing you did. Maria chose to wait overnight, since going through the delivery late at night in our busy inner-city hospital could only make the nightmare worse. We planned that I would meet her in the hospital in the morning. Shaken, she — and eventually I — went home.
We met at eight the next morning on the obstetrical floor. It only took me an hour to arrange for her official ultrasound, which we watched together in silence. Then while she waited silently with her mother in the waiting room, I tried to arrange a bed for her. Our hospital is big and does not run smoothly — it is a good place to be if you have been shot, but for many other ailments, it is far from ideal. I tried being reasonable and explaining the reasons why I wanted her on the obstetrical floor while I induced her labor; I begged on her behalf and appealed to the nurses' sympathy. At one o'clock, they finally told me there was no way they would accept her on the obstetrical floor because her pregnancy had not made it to halfway: this is the policy, they told me. They promised me a bed for her on the medical floor as soon as possible. Promising Maria I would come back at the end of the afternoon, I went to the clinic to see patients.
At 5:30 pm, I went to the hospital and discovered that Maria had just moved into her room. She informed me that she had received her IV but had not been given any medicine yet. She gave me a brave smile and tried to console me in my obvious frustration. Perhaps I should have sent her through the ER the night before — at least her physical ordeal would have been over by now. Instead, she had waited eight hours without eating (nor had she eaten since leaving my clinic last night, as I feared she might need to go to surgery) without a room, and we still did not know when her baby would be born. I spent only half an hour with Maria then; we talked about how the medicine would affect her body, what the cramping would be like, and what her baby might look like when he was eventually born. Then she told me to go home to my family for dinner.
I returned to the hospital for a different delivery around one in the morning. I dropped into Maria's room on my way upstairs; she was sleeping. I asked her mother to have me paged when she awoke. Around 3:30 am, the nurse called me, and I went down to see Maria. We talked and cried again about this little life within her which had so quickly ended; we talked about how the pains are often worse with this type of labor, because there is nothing — meaning no baby to cuddle, to nurse, to celebrate — to look forward to. At 4:10 am, Jesus was born. I was with Maria, and we cradled his little body in our hands. His skull had a small fracture above his left eyebrow from the delivery; otherwise, he was perfect. We wept, and we baptized him.
So many times with a delivery of an already-dead baby, the baby comes without warning. It is born into the bed; the mother is alone; it is frightening, and often dangerous to the mother because of the bleeding that can ensue if the afterbirth doesn’t follow quickly. Yet Maria's delivery, despite our impossible hospital, despite being on the medical floor with one nurse to ten patients, was the best it could have been. And I know that by God's grace, he used me to make it better. This was my answer, I knew: no, Ann, you may not leave the garden. Stay here and keep watch with me. Pray that you will not fall into temptation.
Friday night, we went to dinner and a Lenten Taize service with some friends. After dinner, I told our friend Scott that maybe I was asking God the wrong question. He said he thought I was asking the right question but didn't like the answer. At the service, the candles we lit and placed at the altar reflected their light back to us from the shining marble. The cross, draped in purple, was balanced on its side like Jesus, fallen on the Via Dolorosa and caught by one hand. The Scripture, from Matthew 26, read, "My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done." I wept.
Sunday morning, we celebrated Palm Sunday, the Triumphal Entry. Our whole church waited at the top of the drive for the procession to come, singing, up the hill. We waved our palms. We sang. The wine and the bread were carried after the cross, today with a small bouquet of yellow tulips on it. My son squealed with delight when his three-year-old friend danced by us in the procession. We shouted, "Hosanna!" At the end of the service, girls with banners danced at the front of the church, and my son and I watched them from the front row. He clapped and laughed with joy; I wept more. We sang, "Hail to the King / in all your splendor and majesty" (Larry Hampton, "Hail to the King").
Finally, my spirit was willing, though my flesh is still weak. While Christ labors here in the garden, while he suffers with what evil does in our world, in our city, in our lives, while Christ is sorrowful and troubled until we are all free and can all worship him in his splendor and majesty — I will keep watch with him in the garden. I will drink this cup of suffering with his creatures. Not as I will, but as you will.
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