Elephant Hugs
Elephant Hugs
"So the
last will be first, and the first will be last."
Matthew
20:16 (NIV)
Within
our first semester of Occupational Therapy school, the student who had been
elected by our class to be the class president was unable to keep up with the
physiology and anatomy and she left the program. Because of years in
biochemistry, I was acing physiology, the class that was most challenging to
all of us. My success was overly obvious in our small class, so I got
“default-elected” class president. The last thing I really wanted. Thus it
began. I really enjoyed the coursework of OT school, but getting straight A’s
and being class president often made me feel… too big.
In addition to gross anatomy and physiology, our class was required to take
several semesters of a course titled Psychosocial Issues in OT. It was a class
designed to teach us about the variety of mental health disorders that we might
come across and interventions we might use during our work. Healing the body
always has a mind component, and we were being trained to identify how we could
assist healing processes from both directions, to provide individual and group
therapy interventions at the psychosocial level, and to be knowledgeable enough
to identify when further psychiatric medical treatment and consult was
necessary. We had a phenomenal lead professor for the course. Her central
clinical work was at Southeast Louisiana Mental Hospital, but she also ran
inner city programs to provide job connection and training for the underserved in
New Orleans, and was trained as a crisis counselor. She was and is a
powerhouse.
During the spring of the first year of the course, I remember sitting in her
class one Monday. She and her assistant professor asked us to go around the
room (starting at the front), and state our favorite animal. I was sitting
close to, but not quite at the back of the class, and began musing over the
trip to the zoo my husband and I had just took the day before. We had spent
15-20 minutes thoroughly enchanted by the elephants that were there. So I knew
almost immediately what my answer was going to be, and I was quite excited by
my choice! And so it went. From the front of the class I heard… “monkey,
squirrel, cat, dog, frog, dog, bear, cat, squirrel, monkey, nutria (you can
Google that… it’s a New Orleans thing), chipmunk, beaver, rabbit, lion, cat,
dog.” And then I enthusiastically said “elephant.” The class went right along
without a pause and I heard more “dog, cat, rabbit, squirrel…” But, when I said
“elephant” the eye-raised look my professor gave her assistant spoke a million
words. I suddenly realized I had eagerly and unwittingly become the only
“elephant in the room.” I acutely felt too big. And I wanted to hide.
It certainly wasn’t that anyone else noticed, and our teachers didn't say
another word. But, I became incredibly self-conscious. Pondering this over
time, I realized that this was an important lesson. In working with patients
who have a major injury, a wheelchair, crutches, braces, a behavioral problem,
a loss, a mental health disorder, so many people, for so many different reasons
can feel extremely self-conscious - like they alone are “the elephant in the
room.” I bought this little statue of a monk hugging an elephant for my bedside,
to remember how important it is to embrace the elephant – in me, and in others.
Creator, I remember Jesus said “the last shall be first, and the first shall be
last,” and it makes me remember what it feels like to be the elephant in the
room – big, but so self-conscious as to want to be small. Help me know that you
always make the small big, and the big small, and in so doing You make us all
eventually come out just the right size for wherever you need us most in each
day. Amen.
