Clerical life
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CLARA NICOLL
The easiest and cheapest way to get to the Cambridge University Hospitals from here is to drive over the hill to the Park and Ride, leave the car and catch a bus. The hospital is the first stop. This knowledge wouldn’t have been useful back in the days when I was driving my husband in for his appointments, because he couldn’t have managed the walk from the car to the bus and from the bus to the door. But it’s useful to me now. Now that I’m going in as a patient, that is. Not as a patient’s wife and advocate, not as a priest visiting parishioners, not as someone learning hospital chaplaincy, as I once did, and have the certificate somewhere to prove it. When I go into hospital these days, it’s generally as someone whose innards are being investigated.
I go in by myself, just as I do when going in to see a parishioner. There’s nobody to worry about me. This is liberating. My hospital chaplaincy training, Clinical Pastoral Education, aimed to get trainee clergy to pay attention to the memories and personal defences we were bringing with us into the ward and learn to put them to one side, the better to understand what we were being told by the patients we visited—and to notice what was being said in the silences. Now I’m finding it disconcerting to turn that model on its head and notice how I’m responding in this new role.
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