RE Reflections 6

Today was quite an interesting time for me, since I tried probing deeper into my patient’s life. Although she didn’t quite understand my questions, and I was too meek to clarify and probe deeper, I feel that I have at least gained her trust, since she’s comfortable around me now.

Today, instead of having students come, some people from a company came by to spend their time with the patients. They were both cheery as well as enthusiastic, and some had even brought their spouses and children to help out. I felt that this was really impressive: I was still quite uncomfortable about the idea of probing into my patients’ lives, yet these people seemed to have bypassed that reaction and had gone to the equivalents of the HCA staff. They were very good at what they did, and according to the patients they had been very thoughtful as well. Instead of doing the default, boring games that most of the students did, they put on a puppet show (apparently, a ventriloquist act), sang, decided not to dance, played the piano, and sang some more, and of course they went the extra mile to get the audience to sing along with them. I was really impressed with the entire thing, especially the singing: The Indian man who was singing was a really good tenor, and he really put his all into singing.

Admittedly, we couldn’t really do much today, since the company people had pretty much everything covered (I suspect they are from a company that sponsors HCA), including food. There was a lot more food today, and there were quite a few drinks as well. I was particularly surprised about the food, since usually the patients manage to finish everything on their plates. With the abundance of food came the abundance of patients packing up the remaining food for future consumption. I was really appreciative of how these people had tried their utmost to look after the patients.

The Indian man was really good at singing, and the songs that they were playing were all golden oldies kind of songs. I knew a few of them, but I didn’t use the microphone to sing or anything since the Indian man had that covered pretty nicely. So I just sang along quietly from the back, but I was quite excited about the entire thing, especially since their karaoke CD was displaying the lyrics to the songs, which I found to be an eye opener. I must admit I do find it quite hard sometimes to make out the lyrics of a song until I already know them (or have listened to a song at least 30 times). Duets between the Indian man and some other Chinese woman were quite uncommon, but it happened for the song “Always”, which I found really nice. Unfortunately, since the woman was preoccupied with something, they changed song halfway so that she could do her work. A real pity, since I was enjoying it so much, and so were most of the patients. Nonetheless, the Indian man really picked up from where they had left off and convincingly sang the next piece (another love song, as always).

I really need to get to know my patient better, since we only have a few more weeks with them, and without knowing them I won’t be able to do much for the group biography thing. Hopefully I’ll be able to get that settled by next week.

Andrew.