{"id":1570,"date":"2020-05-15T23:54:21","date_gmt":"2020-05-16T03:54:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/?p=1570"},"modified":"2020-05-17T11:21:32","modified_gmt":"2020-05-17T15:21:32","slug":"the-power-of-companionship-and-the-impact-of-meaningful-patient-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/the-power-of-companionship-and-the-impact-of-meaningful-patient-care\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Companionship and the Impact of Meaningful Patient Care"},"content":{"rendered":"

I only had one patient relationship throughout the year before it got cut short by the COVID pandemic. I met Jane<\/em> early in the fall on my first visit with my volunteer coordinator, and she was a tough cookie. At 105 years old, she was full of life. Jane<\/em> had one close family member remaining that she was in contact with; she never got married or had kids. She did, however, have a lot of friends at her facility. Everyone loved her\u2014patients, staff, and visitors alike. Every room she entered was immediately brightened by her presence. The first time I met her, Jane<\/em> and I chatted for a while about her family, the jobs she used to work, and memories that have stuck with her throughout the years. She was aware that she was aging, but she still took such joy in making conversation with everyone and recounting her memories. I think verbalizing memories helps them become more vivid and entrenched in your mind, and I hope talking to her helped her remember some of those.<\/p>\n

Jane<\/em> passed away last week from COVID19, and I sent her a letter that arrived to her the day she passed. Reflecting on my experience with Jane<\/em> and staying in touch with her became hard after we got sent home from school because I didn\u2019t know when I\u2019d see her next, and it became even harder after I realized I wouldn\u2019t be able to say goodbye in person. I hope that she felt supported by her loved ones in her last moments, because she deserved that and more.<\/p>\n

I visited Jane<\/em> 1-2 times per month, and every time we talked I looked forward to the next time I\u2019d get to visit. In the spring, it became harder to visit Jane<\/em> because lacrosse season had started at Swarthmore, but I\u2019ll never forget one day when I visited her that spring. We chatted in the lobby for a while in the mid-afternoon about her favorite holidays, pets she\u2019d had in the past, and watching the Mummer\u2019s Day parade with her family from their apartment. The facility\u2019s workers then sat us for dinner at a circular table with a few other patients that were friends of Jane\u2019s<\/em>. I had a dinner event to get to pretty soon for a student organization, so between Jane<\/em> ordering her food and the food arriving, I told her that I had to head out to get back to campus. The silent look in her eyes as she grabbed my arm and asked me to stay a little bit longer was the most genuine look I\u2019d ever seen in my life. Jane<\/em> was the liveliest person of her age I\u2019d ever met, and I had never seen her sad, but this was more than a sad look; it was a lonely look. It was then that I realized the impact companionship can have on people. Whether people need a person to talk to because they\u2019re aging, or they need advice on a life problem, or they\u2019re just lonely, companionship is potent. It\u2019s powerful. I stayed with Jane<\/em> for a while longer that day and went to my dinner event late, and it was one of the best decisions I made this year.<\/p>\n

I think that this program\u2019s value for a medical school application is exactly the effect it had on my journey to becoming a physician. Aside from the surface-level learning about patients near the end of their lives, I think this program teaches emotional intelligence and compassion. I think that pre-med students often look to check off \u201cboxes\u201d in clinical experience just for their medical school application and don\u2019t search for the value in their experience, but I think volunteering with Compassus and seeing the impact that companionship had on Jane\u2019s<\/em> life confirmed my desire to be a physician from the patient-relations side of things. Not only did the program give me meaningful experiences with a patient, but it created space for me to reflect on my feelings from the experience. I was unable to make it to two of the resource and reflection meetings because I had an MCAT prep course at the same time on Sundays, but the journaling I did during the year along with this final essay has given me space to write down and reflect on the experience I was able to have with hospice care and with Jane<\/em>, and for that I am immensely thankful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I only had one patient relationship throughout the year before it got cut short by the COVID pandemic. I met Jane early in the fall on my first visit with my volunteer coordinator, and she was a tough cookie. At 105 years old, she was full of life. Jane had one close family member remaining … Continue reading “The Power of Companionship and the Impact of Meaningful Patient Care”<\/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":[15],"program_year":[31],"class_list":["post-1570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hospice","school-swarthmore","program_year-31"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570","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=1570"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1587,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570\/revisions\/1587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1570"},{"taxonomy":"school","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/school?post=1570"},{"taxonomy":"program_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_year?post=1570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}