(Volunteering Hours: 44)
Greetings and Happy Holidays!
Well, the semester is winding down
and this is the last blog post I’m going to write for 2013! Can’t believe the
year is almost over and my fellow students and I are about halfway through with
completing our Masters degree at the wonderful Tulane University. Seems like last week when it was July 17 and
were just starting classes here… How time flies!
I am still volunteering at Touro
Infirmary Emergency Department (ED) and I plan on continuing to volunteer there
next semester when I return from our Winter break. I have not had any experiences quite like the
one I wrote about in my last blog from October… I am referring to when a
particular patient, who was coding, came into the ED and ended up passing away
on the table. It was a very sad and
strange ordeal and something that I will not forget anytime soon. There is one experience, however, that I
think is worth noting here, even though it may be considered insignificant to
some.
An elderly patient had presented to
the ED with a serious, ongoing condition and the doctor was considering whether
or not to put him on aggressive treatment that, in the doctor’s words, “may or
may not help him.” The patient’s family
was there and the doctor had to explain the situation to them; needless to say,
it was an unpleasant conversation for them to have. The physician left the family to decide what
the next step was (the patient was unconscious and could not speak for himself)
and immediate family members were allowed to see the patient one by one.
I noticed that his daughter was
extremely torn up about her father’s condition and the possibility of losing
him in the near future. The ED nurses
and physicians were just going about their day like normal while this woman was
having possibly one of the worst days of her life. I’m sure that the ED staff sees this kind of
thing all the time and they don’t think anything of it, they’re numb to it
all. But for me, this is something that
I haven’t dealt with before and I wasn’t quite sure how to handle the
situation. Do I go about my volunteer
responsibilities and simply let the woman grieve on her own or do I something
to comfort her?
I decided on the latter and brought
her a box of tissues, smiling at her as I did so. Even though I didn’t do anything to help her
dad’s health, I could tell that she immediately felt better and was grateful
for that one small act. That experience
reminded me that medicine isn’t simply about diagnosis and treatment of a
patient; medicine is all around care of the patient, and in this case, their
family.
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