"Only a person who intended to enter room 520 would walk to the end of the long hospital hallway, and that morning I had gone there as part of my rounds. I was in the midst of my second unit of training to become a healthcare chaplain, this one in a struggling hospital that served the most disenfranchised. Our patients were those without friends or family, or those whose friends and family could not care for them: elderly patients stranded in public nursing homes; people who lived in shelters or on the street or who had just been released from jail or a psych ward; men who survived on their social security benefits in SRO's; immigrants without documentation who slept in utility closets in the back of the offices they cleaned; residents of the local rehab centers. It was often the case that mine was the first hand that they had held in a very long time". Judith Leipzig shares more in this moving post.
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