Many of my patients have limited communication abilities and/or have experienced a decline in their cognitive abilities which impacts their communications. One of my patients has severe dementia and is unable to discern who I am or why I am there to visit with her, but she is always cheerful and excited to see me. When I visit her, I sit with her in the common residential area and we talk, sometimes she sings, sometimes I sit with her as she’s engaging in a group activity like arts or crafts or a music lesson. Regardless of what my visit with this patient looks like each week, she has shown me that the kindness and the goodness of the human spirit shows a resiliency of its own, regardless of cognitive ability. This patient talks to me about the importance of friendship and the qualities of a friend, she tells me she hopes I am safe and tells me she hopes I find “it” (which I have interpreted as her way of wishing me happiness and love), and she is always filled with compliments for others.
I have learned from my Volunteer Director that small acts of kindness and human connection on a small scale go a long way. She has always spoken about how valuable the act of volunteering is, and from visiting my patients for the first time with her by my side, I learned about the most valuable skills a volunteer could have. My Volunteer Director was the epitome of warmth, compassion, cheer, and these qualities allowed her to make the patients feel seen and feel special. I was so grateful to get to witness her interact with our patients early on. In addition, the training on communicating with patients was very helpful to being an effective Hospice volunteer, especially because of the cognitive decline that many of my patients have experienced. Similarly, the prompt assignment that referenced communication strategies (Prompt 1.3) was especially helpful to me as I began the volunteering journey and tried to find the best way to communicate with each of my patients, based on what they were capable of and what was most important to them.
Being a hospice volunteer has made my desire to go to medical school even stronger, because it made me aware of a whole other facet of medicine. Caring for and connecting with those who are at the end of life is a crucial part of healthcare that I had not previously thought about before this program. I have always felt strongly about the connection between physical and mental health and how crucial that is to consider when treating patients, and felt strongly about patients being treated with kindness and compassion above all. This experience has shown me tangible effects of how much patients who are dying can feel safe and comforted by receiving understanding, kindness and compassion for a few hours once a week. I think that the greatest benefit of hospice volunteering that I could write about on a medical school application is that hospice volunteering gives potential future physicians a greater understanding of the human condition – how fragile yet strong the human condition is, how the human condition can be so resilient in the face of difficulty. This greater understanding is, in my opinion, invaluable to the way physicians interact with patients who are at all different stages of life.