While I have not been assigned to a patient yet, I can say that my experience interacting with other people that have had patients and people that work in hospices as their career was truly life changing. It opens your eyes as a student on the pre-medical track and even more generally, as a person. My attendance at meetings and completing the prompts has helped me come to the conclusions that while life holds its impermanence, death is essential to capture the significance of the life an individual. Furthermore, I have learned that there is more than just a physical aspect to death that a dying person experiences. There are so many mixed emotions that accompany the process of accepting that you have a terminal illness. With this, I have learned the importance of being a volunteer and providing support to a patient and their family in more than one way. Hearing from others’ experiences with their patients reminds me of how essential it is to show people that you care, not simply in their last months, weeks and days alive, but always.
This program helps those interested in the field of medicine learn how to empathize with the people they treat and learn how to incorporate sincere, emotional diligence into their work as a physician. In undergraduate and medical school, we are given the impression that we should adopt a stoic persona that deals exclusively with the facts presented in each case and person’s condition. However, this persona is not effective in the medical field, as there is a lot of emotional maturity that goes along with interacting with patients. Along with viewing death first-hand comes the struggle of grappling with its implications and finding the beauty behind celebrating one’s life. I genuinely believe that my experience with hospice in the past year has better helped me prepare for a future career in medicine due to the exposure I have received to difficult, emotionally taxing situations and interaction with patients.
Specifically, this program helps pre-medical students develop goals that align with the perspectives gained throughout their experience with hospice. This is due to how hospice work provides a view that medical professionals encounter an emotional aspect in their work every day. So, this program helps future medical professionals either solidify their future plans in medicine or help them decide that maybe medicine is not the right route for them. While I was initially excited to meet patients face-to-face and be in a medical environment for the first time, this program provided me with a lot more than expected. Many people that I have met through hospice work have emphasized that the hardest part of the job is when they say goodbye to their patients in palliative care because it means they might not see them again. While I understand that losing a patient will always be difficult, this program has changed the way that I see death and the dying process as a whole. Death does not mean the end of life, but rather signifies another part of life.