“I don’t think I’m ready for this,” I told myself while driving to Green Meadow nursing facility on my first day of volunteering with Holisticare. As my friends and I stepped into the facility and went through the routine of check-in and sanitization, I gathered all the courage to get ready to meet my first patient ever. Tall Guy, as the staff endearingly called him, lied in bed watching a football game on the small TV in the corner when I met him.
I greeted him with the scripted “Hello, I’m June, and I’m a volunteer from Holisticare.” He nodded lightly then slowly stood up from his bed, adjusted his seemingly worn clothes then walked out of his room without cueing me to follow. I was confused and tried to recall what would be the protocol for this situation in the volunteer handbook. For some reason, my gut instincts told me to stop referring to protocol and just follow Tall Guy, so I hurried after his steps. We stopped right outside of the common area where we both stayed idle and looked at different groups of patients sitting in the room. It must have been fifteen minutes passing by before Tall Guy finally left his spot to join in a table of other patients for bingo. Still, without a word, he pulled two chairs and signaled for me to sit next to him. “
So, what do you want to talk about?” he turned to me when I put my Holisticare orange bag down. I was so happy to finally receive the cue from my patient and our conversations began as the staff’s voice echoed on the mic with the bingo numbers.
In retrospect, my relationship with Tall Guy slowly grew through time from that first day as we shared stories about our families, childhood, and of course favorite food. Toward the end of the year, I noticed that his health deteriorated rapidly, which strained him from participating in our dialogues and making me the primary talker.When I received the news that Tall Guy passed away over winter break, I couldn’t help looking back to the first day we met. I felt as if those words from that email wrapped tightly around a part of my body and squeezed it so hard that it simply vanished. I wondered if the void I experienced is a common thing for health care providers when they realize that they can’t help a patient.
I went over all the prompts and articles that I learned from the training then I came across the documentary Being Mortal. The narratives told in this movie resonated with my story as they pointed out the reality that there are problems that the most brilliant doctors fail to solve, also known as the unfixable and the aging. The inevitable death is imminent, especially for patients in hospice. As much as I would like to help Tall Guy to just hang in there a bit longer, I realized that my job was not to fix his problems. Rather, my job as a volunteer was to listen to his priorities, his stories so that I can offer my companionship. Our relationship was brief but the valuable lessons that I acquired along with the training from Holisticare will equip me for my future dream of entering the medical field. As I prepare myself with various cutting-edge treatments for different diagnoses, I will always look back at this volunteering experience as I find guidance and affirmation during the most difficult time.