Summer 2012 Reflective Essay

Brimming with affection, the woman offered me a kind, toothless grin and extended her hand.  When our palms touched, she clasped my fingers and squeezed, communicating so much to me without even uttering a word.

Suddenly, she turned around in her chair and reached down to the floor, lifting a white plastic bag filled with yarn into her lap.  After rummaging through it for a few moments, she presented me with her latest creation, a small, royal blue coaster decorated with gold stars along the edges.  I clenched it in between my fingers and thanked her profusely, attempting to conceal the lump forming in my throat with a lopsided smile.  My discomfort apparent, she lowered her gaze and adjusted the IV tube protruding from her inner elbow.

Expressing gratitude several more times, I excused myself and steadied my breath.  After almost eight weeks of volunteering in the oncology center at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, it pained me that the work continued to bombard me with emotional obstacles and distress.  Frustrated with myself, I stared down at the tiny, hand-woven craft and traced my fingers along its stitching. 

Moments later, the meal cart arrived from the basement, signaling the start of my next task.  Thankful for an opportunity to busy myself, I rummaged through the floor refrigerator and stocked the cart with juice boxes, sodas, cups of ice water, and Saltine crackers.  One by one, I poked my head into each cubicle and offered lunch to each patient and every accompanying family member.  Often, stoic families ate their soups and chicken salad sandwiches as tired patients looked on with nausea. 

After making my rounds, I headed downstairs for my own lunch break, the smell of the boxed lunches encompassing the entire cafeteria as workers, doctors, families, and children munched happily, thoroughly engrossed in their meals and seemingly unaware of the nightmare transpiring just a few doors away.

Most days, perhaps to assuage my conspicuous unease, the nurses requested that I file for them after lunch, a dull activity that, oddly enough, provided me with some peace.  Alone in the quiet storage rooms, I alphabetized each file and organized them based on last visit date, type of treatment, and importance.  Here, the work proved simple, unemotional, each document in my meticulous control.  When I finished one stack, another appeared, occupying my head in addition to my heart for seemingly endless hours.     

Other days, I performed more lively duties such as transporting patients to the other end of the hospital by wheelchair, collecting samples from the lab, assisting in the perioperative wing, and participating in the cancer center’s bi-weekly extracurricular activity, such as jewelry beading and meditation seminars.  As the weeks passed, I formed friendships with the other volunteers who, like me, applied for the internship position without any prior knowledge of the program or its responsibilities.  Most importantly, I bonded closely with several chemotherapy patients who greeted me every day with a cheerful smile and a story to share.  Their willingness to foster intimacy in a place dripping with eerie uncertainty bewildered me, entwined my feelings of despondency, grief, and emptiness with that of hope and comfort.

After completing one hundred service hours for the hospital, I gloomily relinquished my security badge.  On that final day, I recall staring quizzically at my identification photo, an image of the cheery, bright-eyed, overtly naïve optimist eight weeks before, a child-turned-adult who lacked any direct knowledge of human suffering, a girl now foreign to me.     

Upon my last shift in the oncology ward, I fought back the water works as I received genuine words of gratitude and appreciation from the patients for donating so much of my summer to them.  More than anything, I yearned to explain to them their impact on me and my sheltered, privileged existence of copious good fortune, limited struggle and plentiful health, yet my words failed to form coherently or logically, my throat hollow, my mouth dry.  

Whenever I recall my experience at the hospital, the faces of the patients appear in my mind, their smiles, their tales, their frail bodies, and their perennial warmth.  During personal instances of adversity or periods of fleeting darkness, I often cradle the royal blue coaster in my hands, remembering the strength of the gentle woman who bestowed it, yearning for one more chance to thank her, and wondering, my heart heavy, what became of her.