Nettie Reynolds: HANDS IN MY POCKETS • Cleaver Magazine

Creative Nonfiction by Nettie Reynolds
HANDS IN MY POCKETS

Before every emergency, I put my hands in my pockets. It became such a habit that I don’t remember exactly when it began to feel automatic, only that somewhere during my first year as a hospital chaplain I stopped thinking about it and simply did it. Even on the days I wore a dress, I found one with pockets. I had come to depend on the feeling of my hands resting there before I walked into someone else’s crisis.

The overhead page always sounded the same. “Dr. Leo to ICU 9.” Or the emergency department. Or another room somewhere in the hospital. The room number changed, but the voice never did. Calm. Unhurried. Almost gentle. If you didn’t know what it meant, you might think a physician was being summoned to see a patient. There was no Dr. Leo. Our hospital had decided long ago not to announce “Code Blue” over the loudspeaker because television had taught people to fear those words. Families in waiting rooms stopped talking when they heard them. Visitors looked up from magazines. Anxiety spread faster than information. “Dr. Leo” softened the edges without changing the reality. Somewhere in the hospital a heart had stopped.

It was Mark, our director of spiritual care, who taught me to put my hands in my pockets. Mark carried his humanism with the kind of quiet wonder that made people feel steadier in his presence. He wasn’t interested in telling chaplains what to think nearly as much as he was in teaching us how to pay attention. One afternoon he told me to be mindful, that trauma has a way of pulling us out of our bodies before we’ve even reached the room. By the time we arrive, our minds have already imagined what we’ll find, rehearsed conversations that haven’t happened, anticipated grief that doesn’t yet belong to us. “Put your hands in your pockets,” he said. “Feel your feet on the floor. Let your body arrive before your mind gets there.”

He was right. The walk from my office on the third floor to the intensive care unit never changed. I waited for the elevator and listened to the nurses talking in the hall, while the food service worker delivered patient lunches. The hospital continued with its ordinary work while, somewhere ahead of us, a team of people compressed a stranger’s chest, counted aloud, pushed medication through an IV, and hoped the heart would remember what to do.

What surprised me most was the quiet that settled inside me on those walks. Not calm exactly, because I don’t think anyone who tells you they are calm walking toward a code is telling the whole truth. My pulse always quickened when I heard the page. My imagination still tried to outrun me. But the weight of my hands against the fabric of my pockets reminded me that I was here, not there. Not yet. There would be time enough to enter someone else’s fear. For those few minutes, my only responsibility was to arrive.

I thought, when I first became an interfaith hospital chaplain, that my work would be measured by the prayers I offered or the words I found in impossible moments. It took me longer to understand that patients never came to meet me. I came to meet them. My job wasn’t to bring my beliefs into the room. My job was to make room for theirs.

By the time I reached the room, my hands already knew they would be needed. I just didn’t know for whom.

Sometimes they reached for a spouse standing just outside the curtain, their face searching mine for an answer I didn’t have. We shook hands because it was what people did when they met, though there was nothing ordinary about meeting someone in the middle of the worst day of their life. Sometimes that same hand remained in mine while the physician explained what had happened, or what hadn’t been possible despite every effort in the room behind us.

Sometimes my hands belonged to the patient.

Not every Dr. Leo page ended in death. Occasionally a pulse returned, the organized rhythm of a heart replacing the frantic choreography of compressions and electric shock. If the patient regained consciousness, I would introduce myself quietly, take their hand, and tell them where they were. There was very little to say in those first moments. A hand was often enough.

Other times my hands found a nurse.

Every chaplain remembers the first patient who dies under their care, and every nurse remembers the first death they witness. Experience changes many things, but it never makes another person’s death ordinary. I sat beside young nurses whose hands trembled as they replayed every decision they had made, wondering if they had missed something. Most of the time they didn’t need reassurance as much as they needed someone willing to sit with the questions that never receive satisfying answers.

My hands also came to know the backs of emergency physicians. It wasn’t a gesture we talked about. After a difficult code, especially one that ended in silence, I sometimes rested my hand gently on the back of an ER physician for a moment before either of us walked away. There is a particular weariness that comes from spending your days trying to interrupt death. Even when medicine has done everything it knows how to do, there is often the feeling that one more thing should have been possible.

There were practical things, too, the sort of work people rarely imagine when they think about chaplaincy. My hands slid release forms across tables, found pens for family members whose fingers had suddenly forgotten how to hold one, and dialed phone numbers to relatives who needed to be called before the sun came up. Grief is emotional, but it is also administrative. Someone has to sign the paperwork.

Only years later did I notice that my hands spent very little time belonging to me.

They steadied other people far more often than they steadied me, which I know is why I kept them in my pockets for as long as I could. The walk from my office to the intensive care unit was the only part of the day when they asked nothing of anyone. Once I crossed the threshold into the room, they were no longer mine alone.

Over time, I began to think of hospitals as places with their own language, one spoken less through conversation than through sounds. There was the click of the overhead speaker before every announcement. There was the squeak of rubber soles against polished floors, the soft hiss of oxygen, the rhythmic compression count rising above the alarms in a room where everyone was trying to coax a heart back to life.

Then there was the silence.

It surprised me how quickly a room could become quiet after a code. Just moments before people had been moving everywhere, monitors beeping, voices calling out. Then the physician spoke the time of death, and everything slowed. Machines were switched off. Gloves came away with a familiar snap. Someone pulled the curtain closed. The family entered the room.

Silence has a different weight inside a hospital. It is rarely empty. More often, it is carrying something too large for words.

Toward the end of my clinical residency, after an overnight shift that seemed unusually heavy, I walked back through the hospital toward the front entrance just after dawn. Two Dr. Leo pages had come in during the night. One patient survived. One did not. By then I had already spoken with a family whose world had split cleanly into before and after and sat quietly beside a nurse after her first unsuccessful code and watched an emergency physician’s head sink down in exhaustion. There are nights when sorrow seems to accumulate, settling quietly onto your shoulders until you no longer notice the weight of it.

The automatic doors at the front entrance slid open with the same mechanical whisper they always made, and the cool morning air met me before the July heat had settled over Texas. I remember thinking how strange it felt to leave one world and step into another. Outside, commuters were stopping for coffee, and the city was waking up without any knowledge of what had happened inside those walls during the night.

Just as I reached the doorway, the overhead speakers played Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

Every person who worked in the hospital knew what the song meant. Somewhere upstairs, a baby had just been born.

I stood there for a moment with one hand still in my pocket, listening.

Nettie Reynolds lives and writes in Chicago. Before returning to writing, she spent seven years as an interfaith hospital and hospice chaplain, where she learned that the smallest gestures often carry the greatest meaning. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in CLOSLER, MER Literary, Chicago Story Press, Humans of the World, The Ponder Review, and The Rio Review. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and an MFA candidate at Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing.