I volunteer at a hospital now, so I figured I’d start posting stories about my experiences there. Of course HIPPA compliant which basically means you as a reader shouldn’t be able to identify anyone I talk about via my descriptions. 

I started about three months ago, and I generally volunteer for 4 hours a week. I have to do about 280 hours total. So if you know math AND care, you can figure out how long I’m going to be doing this for.

The hospital is a standard community hospital, it’s not known for anything other than a couple appearances in movies.  It serves a rather poor district of LA, and it’s common to find that homeless people have snuck in during the night and taken up empty patient beds. I am assigned to a single department floor, and act as a runner for the floor. If someone needs something from the pharmacy, I’m the one who goes and grabs it, if a urine sample has to be taken to the lab, I go do that. If papers need to be delivered, if a patient wants socks, if a bed needs changing.  I have a decent amount of patient contact if I wish for it. I can help patients wash, feed them, take them on walks in circles around the floor if the doctor recommends that they get moving,  change diapers, help them order food, or listen to them cry about just being diagnosed with liver disease. I of course have no access to medications, needles, whatever, and I can’t help in a code blue. But I CAN say, “Hey, I think that guy may be choking.” (which happened)

One of my favorite things to do is to take the patients on  smoke breaks. The nurses of course don’t want to do this, cause it takes a while, and they are always over-busy. So like I get to have a little smoke break of my own, without the cigarettes and all the chit chat and camaraderie.  I wheel the patients down to this hidden area behind the hospital in the back of a parking lot and sit there for 20 minutes yapping while they suck down 3 cigarettes. The area is super camouflaged and hidden away, as if the hospital is embarrassed to have a smoking section.  Huh?

The day of daylight savings time, I helped change more than 200 clocks.  We did about one a minute, going in to each and every patient room in the hospital that we could get to before my shift ended.  Delivery rooms and operating rooms were top priority because apparently those are the rooms that care the most about the actual time.

I work in pre/post opp surgery. So anyone in the hospital who is there for a surgery will see my department both before and afterwards.  Normally, I don’t get to see any medicine happen as most patients are in a normal recovery period during their stay.  The program does department rotations, so next month, I could be transferred to a department which is more active, such as the ICU or labor and delivery.  There, there will be more of an exposure to doctors.  For right now, my main contacts are nurses, CNAs, and patients in a lot of pain (or nutty from morphine).  When you are confused as to why your 45 year old nurse is no longer dancing professionally, perhaps you are high.

One of the things I do is sit by the department phone and take calls from the patient rooms, and I dispatch the nurses via the pagers if a patient calls requesting pain meds or needs an IV changed. If a patient calls and wants orange juice, I’ll run and get them that.  This last week, a patient pinged the front desk from her call button and I picked up the phone. She said, “I need help in my room immediately.” Since she was right across the hall, I put down the phone and walked over.  This lady had recently had a hip replaced and wasn’t mobile. She looked at me frantically and said, “Can you grab me my purse, I need to place a bet on the Kentucky Derby. I was too late yesterday!!!” I was slightly not expecting this and was like, “Oh! oh, yeah of course,” and went and grabbed her purse while she explained that she had given up putting money in the stock market, and had decided that putting down a $150 dollars routinely on horse races was a better call because of her background in equestrian sports.

I also do a fair bit of medical record filing. Nothing special. Just taking in the lab reports from the day and filing them away in the gigantic patient binders. Coming off of a background developing for a technology consulting  firm, I was quite shocked at their genuinely archaic way of managing information. The room for data error is HUGE.  If I file an x-ray report under the blood results tab (as in a tactile file folder) instead of under the radiology tab (something that could totally happen), the information flow of patient care could be seriously interrupted. 

Well, that’s a general background of what I do at the hospital when I’m not sneaking down to the cafeteria to grab some free coffee.