Hospitals are not the best places; no one wants to stay, but one was my favorite place for six months. People think of hospitals as some place to sit and wait for bad news. Brunswick hospital is the hospital I visited every day. It had plain white walls, red seats to sit in while waiting, and had a great staff. I was in sixth grade living life as any normal eleven year old. Life was a breeze. Then on February twenty-sixth, my whole world changed. My mother found out she had stage three Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. “Mom was going to die,” was the only thing running though my little scatter brain. She would not see my graduate or follow my dreams. Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is a cancer that runs through the lymphatic system of the body. There are four stages: stages one and two being completely treated very easily, and stages three and four are the most crucial and are sometimes not treated. Statically this cancer occurs under the age of thirty five. My mother found out on her thirty fifth birthday. When doctors’ appointments arrived I went with her during the dire school hours. I had it set it stone that I would be there every step of the way. Eventually the visits started getting shorter because the lovely nurses would sit down and chat with me a bit. Lying in that blue beds with a light blue rob on was my mother getting pricked with sliver needles. She looked like a star in the rough. A smile was always on her face. Praying to God for a miracle was a daily routine while
‘I don’t want to lose her,’ I kept repeating in my head trying to look strong for her. I was trying to not show how scared I was, trying to stop bursting into tears the second I saw her in the state she was. She was so weak and there was nothing I could do to help, except stay out of the doctor’s way. There were nurses and doctors rushing around and giving me a strange look until realization dawned on them. I was at the hospital with my mom around 10 at night, in my pajamas, wondering what was going to happen to her and if she was going to be okay.
With my older sisters away at college, the responsibility of caring for my ailing mother, suddenly fell to me, and my once picturesque childhood was at an end. I spent the early part of my adolescence learning how to run a household and play nurse to my mother. In addition to school and keeping the house in order, I administered her medications, gave injections, learned to catheterize her, helped her bath and use the restroom, and did all of the physician prescribed exercises to help with her leg cramps and numbness. When I had time I studied her disease, determined to find anything that might help alleviate her symptoms and bring the mom I remembered and craved back to me. And though she was often too far gone within her own mind to realize what was going on around her, when she was fully lucid she would smile softly and tell me what a wonderful nurse I would be when I grew up, just like she had been before the disease struck her. Looking back, I wish I could say that I preformed my duties with a smile on my face, but unfortunately that’s simply not
I first became exposed to a hospital setting during my early ages of childhood due to my constant issues with my immune system. To my parents, I was commonly referred to as the sick child in the family since I would constantly catch even the simplest of illnesses such as fevers, colds, flus, running nose, severe coughs and much more. The time period, in which I would visit the doctor’s office, lead me to become more accustomed overtime to the environment and eventually grow a passion for what is being done.
When I was nine years old, I was very sick, and I had to stay in the hospital. I have very few memories of the hospital, but I do faintly recall a few calming faces as I lay in a hospital cot. These calming appearances were the doctors and nurses of the hospital. During my stay, I interacted with the hospital staff which was made up of nurses and physicians. The main reason why I didn’t feel scared about my condition was due to the trust I had in the abilities of my doctors and nurses.
Five years ago, my mother was rushed to the hospital for an aneurysm. For the next two weeks, my family and I sat huddled around her bed in the intensive-care unit, oscillating between panic, fear, uncertainty, and exhaustion.
“Right this way,” the nurse ahead of me was prompting me to a brightly lit hall that was completely foreign to me. I couldn’t help but be terrified by the sights and sounds around me: people chattering, machines methodically beeping, gurneys rushing past. It was my first time in a hospital and my eyes frantically searched each room looking for any trace of my father. She stopped suddenly and I turned to the bed in front of me but I could not comprehend what I saw. At such a young age, I idolized my father; I had never seen him so vulnerable. Seeing him laying in a hospital bed unconscious, surrounded by wires and tubes was like witnessing Superman encounter kryptonite. My dad’s car accident not only made him a quadriplegic, but also crippled
Lymphomas are one kind of malignant tumor and they often start in locations such as the lymph nodes. Lymphoma is the third fastest growing cancer in the world and affects people of all ages. Lymphoma is a common cancer that has specific symptoms and treatments.
During her career as a pediatric nurse, she became very connected with a patient who happened to be her first death encounter. At the time, the patient was a six-year-old boy who was diagnosed with leukemia. ML said: "When I was caring for this patient, I was a mother myself. Seeing that boy and his family suffer gave me so much heartache… it was hard not to make it personal." The more she worked with this child, she observed the pain and suffering him and his family had to go through. She also learned about him and the family dynamics which enabled ML to help the patient and the family become well involved in understanding one another and guide care towards an agreement that everyone was satisfied with. As I reached for the tissue box to hand it to her, I rephrased the story to confirm the understanding of the story. She nodded and continued on talking about things she has done for the patient. Being a mother and a nurse, she believed in providing this child with what a healthy boy would be doing at his age. ML's strategies involved promoting short physical activities, playing games, and encouraging the parents to participate in such activities if possible; ML wanted to provide a lighter atmosphere around the unit and help the patient disregard the diagnosis even if it was just for a little while. Over the past few months, she continued to assist this patient as his
Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre provided me with life lessons I will never forget—kindness and humbleness. Spending my free time in this facility has given me bliss. The patients became my family; I knew their families, their kids, and even their grand-kids. I spent hours getting to know these patients—their stories, their likes, their dislikes. It was refreshing to do their errands, to help them, to feed them, to care for them. At this hospital I learned more than what the doctors and nurses do. I learned more than the mechanics of a hospital. I learned about the patients. I learned what I want to do in life. I learned that eventually I would like to become a medical doctor—to combine my love of biology and assisting
Sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, 7-year-old me swung my feet back and forth under the generic, time-worn furniture and anxiously wrung my sweaty palms. I’d been to the doctor’s before, but with each returning yearly visit the dread that sunk to the bottom of my gut never shrunk. “Jillianne Carrasco?” The nurse called. My stomach turned. I began to shoot my mother a pleading look, but she wasted no time in grabbing my hand and leading me to the smiling nurse waiting at the door, and we both followed her through the pasty white halls to a customary exam room. The nurse closed the door behind us and asked me to take a seat on the crinkly tissue paper cot. She smiled warmly, likely taking note of my nervous breathing and shaky hands.
I stepped behind the front desk of Spirit Medical Center’s emergency room to begin the night shift of April 23, 2002. Half of the rooms were already filled and my coworkers busied themselves moving throughout the sterile halls. If it weren’t for my pager calling me and two other nurses to take on a patient that would be arriving shortly in an ambulance, I would have been a part of the rush. Meanwhile, I observed the friends and families that occupied the uncomfortable wooden chairs in the waiting room. The majority of them wore a somber expression on their faces, but there were the few that had tears streaming down their cheeks uncontrollably as they took advantage of the conveniently located tissue boxes. My observations were soon distracted by the sound of approaching sirens.
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a type of lymphoma, which is universal term for tumors that develop in the lymphatic system. It is also called non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Non-Hodgkin represents for about 90% of all lymphomas, and the remaining 10% are indicating to as Hodgkin lymphoma. Non-Hodgkin lymphomas have an extensive variety of histological appearances and clinical components, which can make diagnosis hard. Lymphomas are not uncommon, and most doctors, independent of their and expertise, will presumably have gone over a patient with
Cancer is defined as the disease caused by an uncontrollable division of abnormal cells in a part of the body. The particular cancer that I️ researched is Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (NHL) which is a type of cancer that begins in the cells of the lymph system. (Lymphoma) The lymph system is a part of the immune system. Lymph tissue is found all throughout the body; therefore, Lymphoma can begin from almost any part of the body since the major sites of lymph tissue are the lymph nodes, spleen, bone marrow, thymus, digestive tract, and adenoids and tonsils. (What) “In most cases, it is not known what causes Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma.” (Risk) Some risk factors of NHL are beyond our control such as age and gender but usually they are acquired rather than inherited. (Risk) NHL begins in white blood cells called lymphocytes. (What) There are two main types of lymphocytes: B lymphocytes ( B cells) and T lymphocytes (T cells). B cells normally create antibodies to
Mary’s, the hospital I volunteered at my freshman year of high school. One of the nurses in the emergency room taught the course, and I begged her for weeks to let me attend. She eventually said yes. In the weeks leading up to the class, I spent hours studying. I listened to videos on my computer while I did my chores and wrote pages upon pages of detailed notes. I heard a knock on my door at five in the morning on the day of the class. My friend’s mom often gave me a ride, she worked in sterile processing at St. Mary’s. When she opened the door she handed me a pair of her scrubs and said “Well, what are you waiting for, go put them on!” It was the best day in the world; I felt just like a real doctor! I sat in the passenger seat of the car with my scrubs and a cup of coffee in my hand, watching the sun rise over the horizon, gently illuminating the
Over the past decade, many of my family members have been in and out of the hospital. My late maternal grandmother frequented Stanford Cancer Center for chemotherapy to treat her stage four pancreatic cancer, which ultimately took her life away in 2008. My maternal grandfather received ablation procedures for his arrhythmia and then later for his pericardial effusion in an international hospital. My aunt was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2010 and underwent rounds after rounds of radiation and chemotherapy at the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center, and finally, my great-aunt was saved in Mills-Peninsula Hospital from a stroke in 2014 that paralyzed the left side of her body. However, what does this all mean?