Midnight calm: Hospital chaplain helps keep faith during the night shift
It’s minutes after midnight, an eerie calm has come to the halls of Adventist Hinsdale Hospital, and Dan Ocampo is racing to bring peace to a world where it seldom exists.
In intensive care, Ocampo encounters a 40-week-old boy, Ethan, fighting for breath inside a plastic incubator. He joins hands with the overnight nurse and places an open palm atop the case. With heads bowed, Ocampo recites a prayer barely audible over the buzzing monitors and wheezing machinery.
In labor and child delivery, Ocampo gathers the nursing staff in a circle and offers words of support to power through the dark morning hours ahead.
“And God said, ‘For I know the plans I have for you.’ We are designed for prosperity and not for harm,” Ocampo said. “Go on and adapt to all those things that God has given you … go on and accept change.”
In this era of nurse burnout and growing stress, the Adventist hospital system in suburban Chicago has hired a full-time chaplain to work the overnight shift, when fatigue and loneliness are at their apex. As hospitals push for new ways to comfort patients and aid staff during difficult times, they’re increasingly turning to chaplains such as Ocampo, whose faith and training provide a different kind of support.
Fifty years ago, churches were likely to re-assign clergy who performed poorly in the parish to hospital settings where they had smaller and more captive audiences, said Jim Gibbons, executive director of the Association of Professional Chaplains in Schaumburg. But most hospitals now require chaplains to become certified in pastoral care and medical training. Some have clinical internships.
Whether full-time employees or on-call volunteers, chaplains are now commonplace in hospitals. But few work solely overnight, when the chaos of day has given way to a cold and brooding stillness. These are the hours in the hospital, doctors and nurses note, when visitors have gone home, when well-wishers have stopped calling and when patients, often medicated and frightened, are left alone to think about what may lie ahead.
“The issue of loneliness and detachment is very real in hospitals, particularly at night,” Gibbons said. “A chaplain helps provide that link to the outside community that can be comforting, for staff and for patients. The kind of people who become chaplains today have an aptitude and an appetite for it – they feel like they’re drawn to it.”
Ocampo, 43, walks the corridors in these bleak hours, slapping backs and flashing a wide grin. He encourages staffers who are struggling with difficult cases. He counsels worried patients as they prepare for surgery. He provides care and comfort for families coping with grief. And often he’s called to deliver a special prayer to patients in the moments before death.
“The last thing to go is the hearing,” Ocampo said. “So I will bend down and whisper into the patient’s ear and tell them that they are not alone. Sometimes, just being there is the most important thing I can do.”
Ocampo and his wife have three children, ages 12, 14 and 18, so when the Adventist hospital system hired him as a full-time night chaplain last fall, it was a life-changing endeavor that meant rearranging his schedule around a nine-hour work shift that begins each weeknight at 9. He spreads his time among the four Adventist hospitals in La Grange, Bolingbrook, Glendale Heights and Hinsdale.
“At first I felt guilty, like I was abandoning my family at a crucial time,” said Ocampo, a native of the Philippines and a Seventh Day Adventist who moved to Bolingbrook eight years ago to become pastor at a local church. “But I know God is looking after them when I am not there. And I know how much good work there is to do at these hospitals.”
Ocampo begins each shift with an unusual request, asking God to ensure a busy night at the hospital so that staff is allowed to fulfill its mission of caring for those in need.
“When I see a vacant room I cry just a little because I know someone out there is sick and needs our help,” Ocampo said, kicking off a recent stint at the 365-bed Adventist Hospital in Hinsdale. Dressed in a dark suit and tie, Pastor Dan, as he is often called, walks the hallways in and around the emergency room, the psych ward, intensive care, child development, cardio care and research labs.
“Hey, hey, how are you angels?” he asks a group of nurses in psych.
“How are you, brother? ¿Como esta?” he asks a night janitor waiting to take the elevator downstairs.
If the nurses are sleepy, Ocampo energizes them. If the mood is dark, he provides some levity.
“He’s such a positive spirit. He listens to us and never seems to rush; he’s never in a hurry,” said Sherry Clark, a registered nurse for the Adventist network. “It can be pretty lonely working these long shifts, and so it’s always a treat to see Pastor Dan. It always makes you feel a little bit better.”
One night recently, Ocampo was called to the bedside of a woman whose husband was rushed to intensive care because of internal bleeding. The injury had come at the end of a prolonged illness, and when it was over, when the man had been pronounced dead, Ocampo was struck by the wife’s stoicism.
“She said to me, ‘I cannot cry now because I’ve been crying for him for five years,’ ” Ocampo said. He stayed by the woman’s side for the next four hours.
On other occasions, he has helped feuding siblings work through the sudden death of a parent, and he once hastily scribbled out a will for a young woman about to enter surgery.
Despite his own strong belief in God, Ocampo said he’s careful not to push his ideology onto patients. And many times, even in the religious-based Adventist hospitals, he will encounter patients or families questioning their faith when faced with difficult choices.
“I don’t blame them,” he said. “But I tell them I’m here to let them know that even though things don’t go the way they want, that God does exist.”
In a way, night chaplain is a job Ocampo has been working toward since he was a boy in the Philippines and part of his job was to escort the elderly in his neighborhood to church on Sunday mornings. By the 4th grade, he’d decided he wanted to become either a doctor or a pastor.
“I chose the church because I could help people for free,” Ocampo said with a laugh and broad smile.
“There’s just a real comfort with him,” said Heather Elrod, a nurse at the Hinsdale hospital. “When he comes by, it just reminds us what we’re here to do, who we’re here to help.”
At the end of each shift, Ocampo retreats by himself to the small chapels in the hospitals’ lobbies. Inside, he kneels before the altar and asks God to relieve him of the grief he’s seen.
“When I leave there I’m feeling light, I’m feeling good again,” Ocampo said. “That’s how I survive.”
By Joel Hood
April 26, 2009
Chicago Tribune
jhood@tribune.com
