A Spiritual Environment of Caring

I was a newly minted chaplain. I just got hired on. And, sure, I worked in hospital wards before, and I thought I understood the needs of patients. Maybe I was just naïve. Or young and inexperienced. I don’t know. Anyway, [I walked into] the room of a patient who was dying. She was alone. No family there. She had a [do-not-resuscitate order] in place, and the team was contemplating [withdrawing] the ventilator for a compassionate extubation to allow her to die from her underlying, very metastatic cancer to the bone, lung, liver . . . everything. I thought I