Stacey Jutila knows the halls well. She has walked miles in those halls. She knows Moses, and all the rest of the Bible. Plenty of the Koran too. Jutila, 32, is the night chaplain at Children’s. She is among the few ordained ministers assigned full time to the night watch of a hospital, in Chicago or beyond. Usually, nights are covered by whoever happens to be on call. Maybe a student. Maybe someone who drew the short stick.
Not so at Children’s. Folks there listened to the nurses, the doctors. Listened most of all to parents who cried out for someone to lean on when the place, finally, is quiet. When you can hear the sounds that don’t sound one bit like home.
“Nighttime here, especially in the [intensive care unit], is the hardest time anywhere,” says Carly Haniszewski, 29, of northwest suburban Huntley. Her only child, 2-year-old Teagan, has a brain tumor and, beginning June 1, the day after the toppling toddler fell flat on her face off a couch, and everyone, especially her mother and father, realized something was wrong, very wrong, she spent 71 nights in intensive care, took six trips to the O.R., was twice told she would not live through the night.
“Your family’s all gone,” the mother explains of the curse of the nighttime. “The floor has become quiet. You hear more of a hospital, the machines. You don’t hear a ventilator until it’s nighttime. You can hear every breath of the bag. You know that that noise is giving your child that breath, and without it, she couldn’t stay alive.
A wonderful story. As a pediatric subspecialist who deals with life threatening illnesses, I cannot overstate the value of in house chaplains.
I remember well my nights and evenings as the on call chaplain at Parkland Hospital. I felt indispensable at times and I never felt superflous or unappreciated by either the patients or staff.
I remember on situation where a family had been in a car wreck. The grandmother had survived, but one of the “sons” (about age 25) had died from his injuries a couple of days before. Some of the family was taking his body back to Mexico for burial and they couldn’t remember what the ER doctor told them on the night the man died concerning why he died. So they asked me what to do and I took them down to the ER and explained the situation to one of the nurses at the desk. This ER (there are 4 ERs at Parkland) was not inundated with trauma cases, so the nurse found the resident who worked on the man and he came and sat with the family and carefully explained what happened and why the man died.
It was a wonderful time where I felt that I had been able to use my “authority” to help someone and bring some closure to a family that had been traumatized.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
Lord, grant your special blessings and strength and compassion to those who work with the weakest of Your children in their time of need. Be with the families and friends and even the strangers of these little ones who need Your special assistance at these rough times in their life.