<p>I saw a lot of patients while I was shadowing an internist but nothing very SpEcIaL that I can talk about. Should I say general things as to I understand how hard a doctor works, long hours, no breaks sometimes n stuff like that??/ And while I was volunteering at an hospital all I did was give ice water to patient. I dont think I can say that for my answer. Any suggestions?</p>
<p>You need to sit down and find something. This is frankly a pretty bad sign.</p>
<p>So you gave ice water to a patient. Did it make you feel good? Did it annoy the heck out of you? Did it feel beneath you?</p>
<p>Did you see gruesome stuff? Were you remarkably un-grossed out, or, if you were grossed out, did you get stronger because of it? </p>
<p>Were you amazed at how much doctors have to know? Was the doctor you were shadowing really nice to difficult people, and that was amazing? Was the doctor really mean to very nice people, and did you vow never to be that way yourself?</p>
<p>Come on, there’s gotta be something.</p>
<p>you didn’t find anything interesting during volunteering OR shadowing? if i were you, i’d ditch the volunteering and stick with the shadowing. i assure you you will find amazing stuff that’ll interest you if you keep shadowing. shadow different doctors and different fields if the ppl and areas you’re shadowing are boring. I recommend the E.R., good ****! the only thing about shadowing is you really can only shadow so much until you see everything of one field. when you get to that point, move onto another field and see what you like. i did tons of shadowing 2 summers ago and i loved it. i haven’t done any since, though, because i felt i saw what there was to offer. you don’t really need to watch the procedure 5 times in order to get a good idea of what’s going on. i think 2-3 times is plenty for each area and then move to something else</p>
<p>i don’t blame you for not having anything to say about volunteering. volunteering is boring as hell. in HS volunteering at the hospital meant taking charts from one area to the next. there was the occasional pushing patients around in wheelchairs, but at the hospital i was at we’d get one wheelchair job every hour while we sat there and did nothing for 50 minutes. I thought they saved the more interesting volunteering jobs for college students, but nope! unless you’re trained to draw blood or something, there’s not too much hands-on tasks for a volunteer to do.
maybe you can try volunteering at a nursing home, i bet that’d be more fulfilling. i just know personally all my hospital volunteering has been boring in my eyes. i absolutely loved the shadowing, though, and i worked as receptionist in a doctor’s office this past summer and that was fun. during the school year i do research instead because i really don’t have the patience to sit around for 2.5/3 hours for an afternoon. haha maybe it’s just my unlucky experiences…</p>
<p>The main role of a volunteer is to go in and spend time with patients – talking, playing board games, listening to their stories. You’re not supposed to do anything.</p>
<p>yea, that’s why i suggest volunteering at maybe a nursing home or somethin where you actually get a lot of patient contact. when i would volunteer at the hospital, they would sit all the volunteers in a room and call our names when they needed a patient to be transported to another wing, parking garage, etc. each person would get called maybe once per hour. so it’s hardly worth 3-4 hours of your time to have 15 minutes with patients. most of the time we sat there playing cards with the other bored volunteers. this may not be as bad if you volunteered during the week. the only time i had to volunteer was on saturdays, which is when the hospital is generally slower and there are more volunteers there since everyone has saturday off.
personally, i loved shadowing in the E.R. because the doctors let me come in to see every patient with them. also often i’d go in with the doctor and then stay with the patient for a while to just talk with them and calm them down to get their mind off whatever they were in the E.R. for. that’s the kind of patient contact i like. that’s why i think a nursing home would be a good idea since i imagine you’d get plenty of patient contact.</p>