Someone Who’s Been There

Today we begin an occasional column that profiles people who work in the health care field and their jobs.

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James Putney pauses at the door and pulls a small bottle of antibacterial soap from his pocket. He squeezes some onto his hands and rubs them together to kill the germs they harbor, then he knocks and goes in to visit 29-year-old Jeannie Kim.

Putney, a chaplain at the UCLA Medical Center, first met Kim in March when she was here being treated for breast cancer. The cancer has since spread to her brain and she can’t see or move her limbs. The doctors are waiting for her immune system to strengthen before they continue with chemotherapy.

It’s been a good day, she tells Putney: She had a craving for an In-N-Out burger, so her husband, Eugene, went and got one. Her 2-year-old daughter comes to see her three times a week, and just knowing she’ll be by makes Kim feel better.

Then, for the next half hour, as nurses rush about their work in the corridors outside, Putney, Jeannie and Eugene talk--about how hard waiting can be, how good her family, friends and church have been, how she worries about how her husband and child will manage if she dies. Putney says a prayer for her.

Putney works in the UCLA oncology wards. Every day, he visits people whose lives have been turned upside down by bad news, who are coping with painful, sometimes disfiguring therapies, and who don’t know how things will turn out for them. Some of them, like Kim, are religious. Others aren’t. Putney visits anyone who would like him to.

It’s kind of ironic, he says, that he should be here doing what he’s doing. He was born with a type of dwarfism--he stands less than 4 feet tall--and by the time he was 21 years old he’d had 12 operations in which his bones were broken and reset to try to improve his gait (he walks with a cane today). This did not leave him with a deep love of hospitals.

And he wasn’t a religious man, not until his early 30s, when he went through what he describes as a spiritual epiphany that changed the direction of his life. Born in 1951, he came of age in the ‘60s and was way into the arts (he readily enthuses about the Beatles and his love of poetry when asked). For years, he used poems, lyric-writing and theater work to help deal with his own disability and the accidental death--when he was 18--of his 22-year-old brother.

He still writes poems, many about the people he meets on the wards. But now his heart’s desire is to do the job that he’s doing.

Putney believes that the mind can help heal the body. That prayer and humor can help heal, too. And while he doesn’t know what it’s like to have cancer--to face one’s own mortality that way--he does, he says, know something about pain, surgery, disfigurement and disability.

“So often I see in people’s faces as they lie there in the hospital bed--that there they are, surrounded by all these healthy people,” he says. “Then I walk in and obviously--ha--I have problems. Here is someone who has felt pain. I think that helps.”

Putney arranges to come back and visit Jeannie Kim the next day, then takes his leave. Nurses, orderlies and social workers greet him as he passes; they congratulate him about his newlywed status. (He was married just a week ago, he explains, to a wonderful woman, after a less-than-promising first encounter: He dashed into the road and she nearly ran him over with her van.) A social worker, rushing by, asks if he could come back later and talk to a family going through a crisis. He is often called in at such times.

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Putney stops to talk with a couple sitting by the elevator. The husband, a kidney cancer patient, is waiting to be discharged. They’re Pentecostal Christians, they tell him, and the three exchange Bible verses, then share a prayer.

Putney goes to visit Karen, 47, who just learned she has leukemia. She’s still dealing with the shock of that, she says, and starts to cry. Putney hands her some tissues, and they talk for a while.

Everyone, he says, needs something slightly different from the chaplain. Many patients need spiritual help just as much as medicine. Many simply need someone to talk to. Nurses, back when he was a kid, he says, had more time to spend with patients. Now they are rushed off their feet.

And so he’ll simply ask patients what they need. He’ll scan their room for clues to what’s important to them: photos of family members, perhaps, or a child’s drawings. He can sense, anyway, when what he is doing is bringing relief--and adjust his approach if he feels that it’s not.

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Sometimes, the best thing he can do for a person is transport them away from the hospital altogether. He did this several times for Deborah Colasuonno, 32, when she was in the hospital in January getting chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant. She’ll never forget it, she says.

“I was very down, I was having uncontrollable crying jags,” she says. “I really needed to tell someone how I felt--someone who wasn’t friend or family. They had enough to deal with.” Soon, Putney came to call.

He asked her what she wanted his role to be, and she told him she needed to escape the stress of the hospital. Putney then took her through a “guided imagery” session. She lay back and listened while he conjured up, with words, the sights, smells and sounds of the seashore.

“James made an unbelievable difference,” she says. “There I was in hospital, sick from the drugs, with these terrible emotions taking over me--and for the first time, I felt totally relaxed. I felt fantastic.”

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Before she went home, Putney gave her a seashell, and as far as Colasuonno’s concerned, that was the nicest thing anybody could have done for her.

Putney also talks about guided imagery to Eugene and Jeannie Kim today, and Jeannie says that she’d like to try it. She’s read books on the mind-body connection, she says, but hasn’t known how to apply it to her life. So Putney tells her a story about Jeannie up on a mountain, leaning against a tree with the sun on her skin. She shuts her eyes, relaxes.

Often, when Putney tells people what his job is, they’ll say, “Oh, that’s got to be really depressing, really hard.” And it can be very hard, he says. Hard but also fulfilling--the most wonderful thing, he says, that he’s ever done in his life. He meets such exceptional people.

He’s grateful to all of them, he says, for showing him how people can face tough times with grace and strength, and how important it is to glean as much joy as possible from life.

“Some people travel the world to see gurus to learn the secrets of the world,” he says. “I learn them every day from my patients.”