By Jim Nichols

Barbara Brown Taylor is a wordsmith who can pack a sermon into an amazingly small number of keystrokes. In a short essay titled Life-Giving Fear, she wrote the following which I have paraphrased: “It is not a bad thing for us to feel the full fragility of our lives. It is not a bad thing for us to count our breaths in the dark, not if it makes us turn toward the light.”

A few times during my chaplain training a supervisor said, “There will be patient encounters that will stay with you all your life.” This paraphrase from Taylor reminded me of one patient as a memorable example for me. I have changed a few details for anonymity.

The hospital had four patient rooms strategically located nearest the nurses’ station. The rooms were fitted with closed circuit television cameras that were monitored by the nurses. The explanation given to me was that these were the four rooms where patients who were on a ventilator were closely monitored visually. 

I eventually ended up seeing this patient multiple times over the course of a month. The first time there were several staff people busily working in the room. The patient was a young man with a severely damaged face. The rest of his body was covered except for his muscular tattooed arms. One eye was either missing or sewn shut and the other was closed. He was heavily bandaged all over his head. He moved periodically as if to get up but could not move far because his arms were tied down to the bed. The first time I entered the room I did not know whether even to speak. I simply stood and observed the scene for a while, then went back out to the nurses’ station.

I read the medical chart, and the nurses filled me in. Briefly, he had been in a vehicle wreck at least a week earlier. The chart noted that, supposedly, he was arguing with his girlfriend in the car and lost control of it. Since he was not wearing a seat belt, his face hit the windshield and then, as the car rolled, he was thrown partly through the driver’s window. The medical description had much detail about his facial injuries, how many different physicians had worked on him, and details about removing fragments of glass and grass from various places.

On my visit the second day, the door was open again; a nurse was present. She answered my query for a status report. The patient had restraints on and periodically tried to move, though still both eyes were closed (or missing.) The nurse spoke to him and reminded him that she understood his frustration because of the restraints on his arms. “If we loosen the restraints, you still cannot get up, but you could move your arms.” Apparently, the nurse saw some communication from him that he was agreeable to this, so she loosened the ties.

Fast forward two weeks and I had realized by now that the reason the patient would not talk to me was that his jaw was wired shut—he did not speak to anyone. We had, however, established some communication as he used his one functioning eye and tablet on which he wrote. We also figured out some sign language.

At one point, a Catholic priest/chaplain friend at the hospital told me that he had had lots of experience with gang members. He proceeded with advice such as asking the patient about his life and whether aspects of it made him happy. “They will always say ‘No,’ he said, and then you can continue the conversation from there.”

On day later he handed me his tablet, and I read in elementary school writing: “Can you help find me found out all who help me the night I came in the hospital so I can thank them and keep them in my prayers? Without them I don’t know where I would be.” Below this note he wrote one name, the name of the charge nurse for the evening shift on that floor.

The last time I saw him before he moved to another floor, I said to him, “I have a question for you. I would like to know how you are different now from four weeks ago (before the wreck). How are you different in your heart and your mind?”

Using the sign language we had devised, he signed a message which I repeated back to him. “God opened my heart and my mind.”

He nodded yes.

Barbara Brown Taylor: “It is not a bad thing for us to feel the full fragility of our lives. It is not a bad thing for us to count our breaths in the dark, not if it makes us turn toward the light.”

Jim Nichols is a retired Abilene Christian University biology professor and current hospital chaplain