My first visit with \u201cRoss\u201d consisted of silence. When I first met him, he was sitting in a wheelchair by the window of the nursing home common room. This was my first time meeting a patient face-to-face, and I was terrified. Steeling my nerves, I approached his wheelchair and tried to introduce myself, but \u201cRoss\u201d did not show any form of response. I did not know this at the time, but \u201cRoss\u201d was 102 years old, completely blind, and had declining hearing; he had not been aware that I was next to him. It was only after my third attempt at introducing myself that \u201cRoss\u201d became aware of my presence. This first set of interactions knocked me mentally off-balance, and the rest of the visit proceeded in a similar fashion: \u201cRoss\u201d had trouble understanding me, and I had trouble understanding him, resulting in the remainder of this first meeting being filled with an awkward silence.<\/p>\n
On the second visit to \u201cRoss\u201d, I sat down closer to him in an attempt to better understand him, while also speaking louder and slower myself. This proved to be successful, and \u201cRoss\u201d began telling me stories of his past. Over the next couple visits, I learned that \u201cRoss\u201d loved music: he used to play the harmonica, and in his teenage years, he would often perform at street corners for extra pocket money. During one of these visits, \u201cRoss\u201d told me that he was saddened by the lack of musical instruments at the facility. I had been playing the piano for upwards of a decade, so upon hearing this, I began wondering how I could play songs for him at our visits. Since there was no piano at the nursing home, I decided to buy and learn the melodica \u2013 a small, inexpensive mouth-organ that was played with a keyboard and sounded like a harmonica.<\/p>\n
On my next visit to \u201cRoss\u201d, I brought the instrument with me. I sat down next to him, and began playing the opening notes to \u201cGod Bless America\u201d \u2013 a song that \u201cRoss\u201d had mentioned liking in our previous visit. I was shocked when, a couple measures in, he began singing along in a voice louder and clearer than any I had previously heard from him. When the song reached its end, \u201cRoss\u201d began laughing, shouting \u201cBravo!\u201d Upon looking closer, I noticed that his eyes were slightly damp. This was the happiest I had seen him.<\/p>\n
When I had first met \u201cRoss\u201d, there was a great sense of psychological distance between us: the massive differences in our ages, conditions, and positions created a subconscious sense of discontinuity. In retrospect, during that first meeting, perhaps I was viewing \u201cRoss\u201d more as a patient with a set of symptoms rather than as a person with their own rich history and personality. However, as I talked more with \u201cRoss\u201d, as I listened to his stories and played music with him, this psychological distance closed. Watching his reaction to my melodica performances made me realize how much these small gestures meant to him. Music was something I had learned without any intention of using in healthcare, and yet it was incredibly valuable during these patient visits, much more so than my technical knowledge of math and science. Patients are more than just the sum of their biology, and there is more, so much more, to patient care than just medicine and surgery.<\/p>\n
Reflecting on my initial visits with \u201cRoss\u201d, I realized how easy it is to alienate patients, to see them as just collections of symptoms, and forget that deep inside, we are all human beings who need warmth and company. As the semester with Athena Hospice ends, I\u2019m left wondering how widespread this alienation between healthcare professionals and patients is throughout the industry, and how pervasive its effects are. I won\u2019t pretend to have a solution, and I\u2019m not even confident that I myself will be able to overcome this psychological disconnect with future patients. Nevertheless, my experiences volunteering with Athena Hospice and Compassus have made me deeply aware of these complexities, and I will remember my visits with \u201cRoss\u201d and the lessons I learned as I proceed deeper into healthcare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My first visit with \u201cRoss\u201d consisted of silence. When I first met him, he was sitting in a wheelchair by the window of the nursing home common room. This was my first time meeting a patient face-to-face, and I was terrified. Steeling my nerves, I approached his wheelchair and tried to introduce myself, but \u201cRoss\u201d … Continue reading “Sounds Crossing the Distance”<\/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":[7],"program_year":[54],"class_list":["post-2506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hospice","school-princeton","program_year-54"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2506","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=2506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2520,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2506\/revisions\/2520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2506"},{"taxonomy":"school","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/school?post=2506"},{"taxonomy":"program_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_year?post=2506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}