Taking The Time To Smile At Every Patient

Jacob Luke Holley
Rambo
English 1010
January 25, 2013
Taking the Time to Smile at Every Patient Working in a hospital I encounter and interact with hundreds of sick patients each and every week. Some patients are in and out of the hospital in a day, while others lay in a hospital bed for months on end. Now being a catering associate, I'm not going to be able to heal them like a doctor or nurse could, but I can take their food to them with a smile. This smile shows them that I care and makes it easier for them to open up to me. From smiling at every patient I have come to know more than their name, birth date, and hospital diet they are on; I have come to know their complete story and not just why they are in the hospital. I have became friends with some patients and have gained wisdom and knowledge from others. Taking the time to smile at every patient has made my job much more fun and enjoyable and because of this, it is something I believe. Standard procedure as a catering associate normally consists of getting a patients name, their birth date, and the diet a doctor has put them on while they are in the hospital. After you get this information you are to take their patient their meal. Now for some catering associates, this is all they do, but I try to go above and beyond the average. I think it's the little things in life that mean the most, such as taking the two or seconds to smile at a patient and maybe brighten their day. I have worked at the hospital for almost a year now and I have come to have my own floor that I work on every day. My floor typically has some of the sickest patients in the entire hospital and usually they aren't in the greatest of situations. That being said their stay in the hospital usually consists of doctors and nurses normally telling them bad news and this can be very frightening and scary to many. This is what gives me my motivation to try and make their day a little bit better. Walking into a room with a big smile on my face is a nice and warm greeting. It lets the patient know that I care and I am there to help them with whatever I can. It also typically sparks a conversation with the patients. Some patients have family there to conform them, while others don't. My ultimate goal is to get the patients mind off of whatever negative thought they may have. Conversations with a patient can be serious, while others are funny and about the most random things. I have some patients tell me about places they have lived, some want to talk about sports, and some patients have ever told me about sex stories. All of this is made possible by my belief of smiling at every patient. One of my patients that stands out the most to me was this middle aged man that was in the hospital for almost two months. Everyday his wife spent as much time by his time as possible, but laying in bed awake for sixteen hours a day you eventually run out of things to talk about with one another. So every day I would go to his room for his room and talk for about twenty minutes, giving his wife a break. I started to learn more and more about them every day. I learned that they were from Mountain City, Tennessee and had been married for twenty years, after both of them going through three divorces apiece. I also learned that their hobby was to hunt in their spare time on the property they owned. They would hunt anything from squirrels to wolves and ever larger animals. Now me being a city kid, I didn't have the slightest clue about hunting. After spending a couple minutes with them each

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