I Give My Time

So I'm sitting here at the James Cancer Hospital volunteering. I love the fact that I do this--it makes me feel good about myself. It makes me feel like I'm contributing to society and doing something useful with my time.

What do I do here? I sit at a desk and play online for about 1 hour and 40 minutes of my time. The other twenty minutes every other Thursday I talk to patients' families, update them on surgeries, send family members to rooms to find the patients... The most frustrating thing, however, is trying to keep track of these family members. They wander off and don't mention anything and, of course, the doctor chooses that moment to call or come up here. I then look like a moron because I don't know where the family went. *sigh* Oh well, I do it and try to do my best at it.

Of course, tonight there was the family who has been up since 3 a.m. I feel for them, I really do, but please don't take your frustrations out on the volunteer staff. It's not our fault that your mother doesn't have a room yet and has been in recovery for 3 hours instead of the 2 hours that we tell you or the 1 hour the doctors tell you. The nursing staff doesn't tell us why she's been in there so long, either. I am not employed or schooled in the medical field and have no answers for you besides what I've been told. Please be patient and know that if something were really wrong, someone would tell you. But I can't say all that. I can be sympathetic and try to get as much information as possible for these people. So I do.