Having experienced the quality of care provided to relatives in my personal life who had benefitted from hospice care, I was pushed in the initial direction of becoming a volunteer just to give back to an organization that had given so much to the people in my life in their various conditions of dying. Since then I have volunteered for the past three years and will be completing my second Athena Institute Pre-Med Hospice Volunteer Program this year. With the pandemic, my exposure to patients was a little more limited than I had hoped. However the experiences that I did have, solidified my decision to begin my journey to applying to medical school upon graduation this May.
One patient in particular from this past year had a very profound affect on me. My patient had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease longterm, but was admitted to hospice care after a stroke. When I would go spend time with the patient, their only request was for me to read to them. For this patient, that was the form of comfort and companionship that they needed. There were complications with their personal life that they would rather not talk or think about, but the ultimate problem was that the patient was neglected by family and not being visited. Instead of talking and getting to know each other, like I had done so many times with other patients, this patient wanted to escape the reality of loneliness through listening to fiction books read aloud. This patient taught me how conversation is not necessary for human connection and relationships. The soft smiles and silent nods denoting the beginning or end of our weekly reading period were gestures I hold close to my heart. Over the course of several weeks, I had noticed the patient’s and my own anxiety increase as his health degraded. This patient ended up passing away in peace, the day after family had finally visited.
You see, our healthcare system works to embrace the beauty of life and more oftentimes neglects the collateral beauty of death. The closer I have become to graduating college, starting my life, and choosing my career path, the more value I’ve found in the teachings of the Athena Institute and palliative care. I’ve wanted to be a physician for as long as I can remember and have always had this ideal image of what the duties of a physician were and what made a physician a good doctor. Life is beautiful, and we have a society which has deemed the success of a life being one that was long and healthy. We have structured healthcare around this ideal and the priority to treat the living. Training physicians for the living excludes a whole cohort of patients that is comparable in size to the number of patients diagnosed with cancer each year. The unfortunate truth is that over a million and a half patients are treated in hospice care each year. That means over a million and a half people each year look to healthcare not for treatment to live, but rather comfort to die. As a future physician one of the most profound realizations I’ve had to make is that treating a body to live is the easy part, but treating a person to die is the hard part. Being a physician doesn’t only include being able to help patients live, it also includes helping patients die.