Wednesday 4 September 2013

A change.

For the past year, I've been volunteering in a hospital one evening a week. Duties mostly involve helping people eat, getting them shopping (let's face it, hospital food isn't going to win any Michelin stars even when the quality is relatively high), patient surveys, and just generally spending time with people. I won't lie - I wasn't motivated by altruism or some deep sense of caring for my fellow human beings; I'm considering applying for medical school in a few years' time, and figured it would look good on my application if I do. Another thing I should admit is that when I started, I expected to hate every moment of it. I don't consider myself a 'people person', and often find it hard enough to be around friends and acquaintances for long periods of time, so being forced to smile and be kind to a bunch of people I don't even know is not my idea of a fun time. (This make it sound like I don't appreciate my friends; that's not the case! Spending much time with others just doesn't come very naturally to me - I blame a childhood that featured plenty of books and no siblings)

But now the end is approaching; tonight was my penultimate shift. To some extent, I've proven myself right: I still feel awkward when I'm asked to just go have a chat with a lonely patient, and can't keep a conversation going to save my life - luckily, in a lot of those cases, the patients themselves just want to have someone to chat to, so it's fairly easy to just sit there and answer their occasional questions. However, in other ways I've surprised myself. Sure, there are some patients I'd rather run away from screaming; recently, a female patient demanded - demanded! - that I go get her some shopping. I was in the middle of helping someone else with their dinner, and at any rate, while I'm happy to go just about anywhere within reason to get what a patient is after, a little appreciation goes a long way. She was still asking for someone to get her things when I went home. But the majority of patients have been lovely.

What I've found most surprising about the experience has been the fact that there have been patients, especially ones I met on a number of occasions, about whose fate I actually started caring. When I started, I'd never anticipated I would feel anything other than complete detachment to these strangers! There was the cancer patient who, the first time I was asked to help her, was too weak even to swallow more than a little jelly, but the last time I saw her (just before she was discharged), almost two months later, happily ate a normal dinner without help. There was also the elderly lady whose trajectory, sadly, went the other way. There was the patient with a brain tumour, whose symptoms meant that she recognised me some weeks but not others.

Spending all this time in a hospital has also greatly increased my appreciation of the work nurses do, by the way - something that is easy to miss when you spend a significant proportion of your professional life reading news about how allegedly lazy and incompetent they all are. They (have to) work incredibly hard and are always busy, but nevertheless they're almost invariably friendly. I suspect that if there is banter, that's just a way to stay sane in what can be a slightly crazy environment. And they're probably working while bantering. Besides, nursing is hardly a career anyone would choose for easy money!

So anyway, I've secretly come to enjoy my three hours a week quite a lot, even if it is sometimes a colossal pain to have to get out of bed extra early because of it. This evening, I found myself in a slightly surreal situation with an erratic patient and a junior doctor. Neither the doctor nor I knew what to do with the situation, but when the patient eventually calmed down, I realised I'm actually going to miss all this - I'm having to quit because this year my shift will clash with uni - and I'm kind of, a little bit, wondering if I could maybe fit in a shift on a different evening.

Who knows, I might turn into a people person after all :)

By the way, I know I've been getting increasingly off-topic lately (and this really is an unusually gushing post, isn't it), but I've come to realise that mocking the Mail/Express's inability to convey even the most basic scientific facts is just too easy. And it gets a little monotonous :)