My Volunteering Experience At Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital

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My most significant learning experience from a community service activity has come from volunteering at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. When I started working there, I had a preconceived notion that volunteering at a hospital meant I would get to see and be a part of the science and medicine. It is this [supposedly naive] viewpoint which actually drove me to turn a regular high school volunteering experience into one of my most significant learning experiences. I started out in a post-operative care unit, assisting nurses and attending to patients. The majority of my work involved taking care of patients’ wants and needs, whether that be food, water, an extra warm blanket, or taking a trip down to the gift shop; as well as managing the discharge paperwork, making sure folders were all put together. While I found my activities to be educational as a whole, they were not quite as fulfilling as I had wanted them to be. Intrigued more by the medical aspect of the work, I asked many questions about the procedures and medicines; however, the nurses and certified …show more content…

Here I helped with scanning, labeling and sending x-rays. From the get go I got to see everything from normal pre-operative chest x-rays to fractured limbs. I had an immediate liking, as it gave me the chance to apply my recently aquired anatomy and physiology knowledge. As my interest got piqued by the work I saw around me my inquisitiveness rose up; the radiology technologists were more than willing to explain the basic concepts of the scans and did their best to answer my questions. After some weeks one of the technologists recommended that, since I cared so much, I meet with the radiologists themselves to get a deeper understanding of what I was looking at. He introduced me to the radiologist on-call that night, who showed me the reading

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