When I began my time in the pre-med hospice program, I was coming off of three months of working as a nursing assistant in a woefully understaffed nursing home, made worse by the constant rate of employee turnover due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While I found this job satisfying because it gave me the chance to help many people, I was also aware of how I simply moved from room to room without getting to know the people in them, merely keeping up the tempo needed to get to every room by night’s end. My work was lacking in meaningful relationships with the people who inhabited these rooms, and so I sought something more. This is why I joined the hospice program.
Much of my experience with the hospice program was interacting with the weekly prompts, as the COVID-19 pandemic put off actual visiting with hospice patients until recently. These prompts and the incites I gained from interacting with the readings and videos have been of great value to me. Through the whole of my education to this point, I have had little interaction with concepts of death and dying, so for me these prompts were essentially an introduction to these matters. At the beginning of the program, I had a deep-seated fear of death and dying. Admittedly I felt uncomfortable interacting with these topics. I could not possibly say that I do not still fear these concepts, but I can say that I am now able to interact with these feelings as if viewing them objectively from a distance. Within this framework, I can now consider what it would mean to have a good death, whereas before, the words “good” and “death” were antithetical to me. I have grown in both knowledge and perspective with regards to death and dying, and I know I will be a better doctor for it.
I have been fortunate enough to enter one particular room since the start of the program, where I met a lady who was bound to challenge my perspective on certain aspects of life. For the sake of her privacy, I will call her “Edith”. The first time I met “Edith”, we simply played cards. As we grew comfortable in each other’s presence, I got the chance to hear about her life. What was most meaningful for me in this interaction was realizing the impact I was having on her day. She told me about how she has no family in the area, and how she has outlived all of her friends, her husband, and even her own son. Me being there with her, just listening to her life story and validating her feelings, clearly means very much to her. In turn, this effect I have on her life means very much to me, and I hope that in my career I can make more connections like this. This experience and other experiences in this program have strengthened my desire to be a doctor, but at the same time have shifted my goals towards a specialty where I can form meaningful relationships with my patients and get to know their stories. I believe this is the value I have taken from this program, and that which I will convey to medical schools in my application.