A year is a long time to be visiting patients – or 7 months really. Looking back, a lot of my patients blur together especially since I didn’t often see the same patients for long periods of time. So what sticks out instead are the brief interactions, the ones that were unique and special and sometimes delightfully weird.
I remember one woman, who upon learning that I was a neuroscience major, informed me in all seriousness that the way to avoid dementia was to eat a lot of cashews and walnuts. She told me how when she had heard that, she went right out and bought a bag of cashews, but couldn’t finish them because she hated the taste. “But when cashews and walnuts are all chewed up, they’re the stuff that our brains are made up of.” She told me how it was okay for her though, she had avoided dementia even without the nuts! And then she proceeded to tell me this 4 more times over the course of our hour long conversation because she had kept forgetting that she had already told me. The really sad part is, she was not wrong. I looked it up when I got back and cashews and walnuts contain a lot of Vitamin E. A recent study just showed that Vitamin E can help prevent age-related memory decline and linked cashews as a good source of it.
The thing is, I can’t force meaning upon these interactions. I think they stand alone. I remember another patient whose interaction prompted my poem. It was a busy day for the patients that day and most of them that I had tried to visit were uninterested. So I just kept crossing off room numbers from my list. Finally, I walked into the room of a husband and wife. The husband was asleep the whole time but the wife wanted to talk. I spent so long in that room that day, just chatting with her about her and husband’s story. They met at college when he came in to her campus job. She was also kind of seeing someone else at the time. However, her brother had told her that her husband was definitely the better match and here they were over 60 years later. She was perfectly pleasant and that was easily one of the most light-hearted conversations I’ve had with any patient. But then a nurse came in and asked to move her husband. And she exploded. She turned angry and aggressive, yelling at the nurse for interfering with her husband. The nurse asked me to leave then and as I did I realized that she had not been my patient at all. It was her husband who was on hospice and her husband who was dying. And it made sense suddenly, her energy in both the conversation and the little tiff later.
The last interaction I want to describe here is short. Having a one-time visit with a nonverbal patient, another volunteer and I were very unsure of how to approach the situation. How do you connect with someone without conversation? And so we found out her age from the nurse and then started to play music from her youth. Mostly Elvis, although we did mix it up a few times. She wasn’t very responsive and didn’t seem very aware of anything around her so I don’t even know if it helped. I like to think it did, that it gave her some sort of social interaction and companionship but I can’t be sure.