With all that has been going on in the world with coronavirus, I have had a lot of time to think about what makes life so meaningful. I have come to the conclusion that one of the most important things in my life is human interaction. The past few weeks, despite feeling like I am in an extremely lucky position given the resources I have in the presence of coronavirus, I have felt lonely.<\/p>\n
Back in the beginning of September when we received our first prompt titled Being Mortal<\/em>, I didn\u2019t fully understand the importance of hospice work. Atul Gawande described the two \u201cunfixables\u201d as \u201cdying and aging,\u201d but what did that mean for me? How could I have an impact? My patient from October through December had senile degeneration of the brain and was advanced in her illness when I first started visiting her. She could not converse very well or move out of her bed, which meant most of my visits were quiet and I did most of the speaking. I learned to appreciate the power of silence and just \u201cbeing there\u201d with her. She would grab my hand, and I could feel her squeezing it with each breath she took. I would often flip through pages of the dog book and, although she could not speak very well, she would look up at me and give me an amazing smile that told me my presence was appreciated.<\/p>\n I remember one visit in particular was cut short because her neighbor had come to visit her. For a few minutes, though, we were both in the room and she was overfilled with joy. He was talking to her about people that still lived in her old house who loved and missed her very much, and she was crying tears of joy and squeezing both of our hands. In order to give her friend space to visit, I informed her that I was heading out but would be back the next week. She grabbed my hand tighter, pulling me in, and looking back and forth between me and her visitor, she mouthed the words \u201cI love you\u201d while tears were running from her eyes and she was struggling to breathe.<\/p>\n I had only been to visit her about five times at this point, but these three words told me the value of my company. My visits reduced her loneliness in the last stages of her life.<\/p>\n In an article titled, \u201cThe Lesson of Impermanence,\u201d Saunita Puri says \u201c…understanding death as inevitable is necessary to appreciate the meaning and beauty of life.\u201d This stuck with me. In the case of my patient, she was not undergoing any sort of extensive treatment to try and gain more time. Rather, she was having visitors, listening to classical music, looking at images of dogs that made her laugh, hearing stories about my week and the snow we got that day. I, by nature of hospice work, did not know her prior to the last few months of her life. That being said, I could not be the person to recount the beautiful aspects of her life prior, but rather I could attempt to raise the beauty and comfort she felt in the time she had left.<\/p>\n This work did not tell me exactly what I would like to do with my life, or what job path I would like to pursue; however, that is not to say that this experience was not enlightening. I learned more about the value of life and acknowledging and accepting change and impermanence than I could have imagined and, although I no longer plan to go to medical school, I hope to continue to be involved in hospice work moving forward as much as I can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With all that has been going on in the world with coronavirus, I have had a lot of time to think about what makes life so meaningful. I have come to the conclusion that one of the most important things in my life is human interaction. The past few weeks, despite feeling like I am … Continue reading “Minimizing Loneliness”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"school":[14],"program_year":[31],"class_list":["post-1351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hospice","school-haverford","program_year-31"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1351"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1469,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions\/1469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"school","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/school?post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"program_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_year?post=1351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI have since realized my place is to minimize this loneliness in a time when patients need the most love.<\/p>\n