Man, there HAS been so much going on already...

Yesterday was my orientation at Hospital for Special Care. I saw and got an orientation to all the floors and met a LOT of people and got my badge/pager and all that.

Today was another "Group" day. Those are pretty intense. It was my first time doing "worship". Didn't go the way I had seen it in my head...as much as I think about things ahead of time, I got way nervous and with the whole "interfaith" aspect, I'm totally over-analyzing what I can say and what I can't...and am really pretty nervous about saying or doing the wrong thing.

Other than those kind of things, group is really personal, and I won't go into that here.

After that, I got to go into the cancer center and spend some time with the patients there.
At first it was a little awkward trying to make sure I was out of the way of the nurses and just introducing myself to patients. After a while, I found a few people who were really interested in talking. One woman in particular who had been there with one of the patients and hadn't eaten and wanted to get something from her car, but didn't want to leave the patient alone. So, I sat with the patient (who I found out later was a woman that this person was a caretaker of) while she went to her car and got some food. When she got back, we spent a lot of time talking about her job as a caretaker and she told me more about the woman she was with. Towards the end of her treatment, the woman had woken up and started talking with us a little, too. The nurses are really nice there, and seemed really open to my being there and willing to interact with me, too. I haven't found on a lot of the floors that people working in the hospital even notice when someone new is on the floor...so it was nice to have that. The nice thing is that since we don't have our cell phones on, I didn't know what time it was...so I was able to focus more on the people there than on the time...and ended up staying a lot later than 5. But I just figure the conversation is over whenever it's over, you know? Especially when it starts mid-afternoon and some of these people are there for hours sometimes (I got to learn more about the treatments and everything from all 4 of the people I spent a lot of time with).

Tomorrow is my second day at HSC. I know there are more orientation type things to do, but I'm not sure when we're doing that. I know I have a few patients that requested for a chaplain to visit, so that will be part of tomorrow.