Reflection Paper

When I was a little girl in elementary school my teachers would ask me every year what I wanted to be when I grew up. I would always respond that I wanted to be a doctor so that I can help people, like my grandfather. My grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s before I was born, and the older I got, the more I saw his disease progress. It truly enthralled me that my grandfather had trouble remembering what the date was, but he could remember things in his life that happened more than 50 years ago like when he fought in the Vietnam War. He was even able to tell me about specific events that occurred during that time. However, I think what astounded me that most was the way the disease affected his body. One day my grandpa would need a wheelchair

Therefore, I honestly think that that was the moment where I decided that I wanted to further my knowledge of understand pain and how it interacts within the body.

After my grandfather passed, it made me think about what exactly do I want to be in life and how am I going to be able to help people doing that particular occupation. To many people this way of thinking is considered very mature and especially not expected of a sixteen year old at the time, but I have always been called a very mature child as contradicting as that sounds. My mom understood my passion to help people and she signed me up to volunteer at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, Georgia. That was one of the most eye opening experiences of my life. The first year that I volunteered there I was assigned to the Women’s Center, Progressive Care Unit/ Intensive Care Unit, and the Oncology Unit. My first initial thought was that I was never going to see anything really spectacular because I was not in the Surgical Unit. Therefore, I would not be working closely with an anesthesiologist, but I do not think I could not have been more wrong than I was. In the Women’s Center I was able to assist obstetricians

I learned that I did not want to become an anesthesiologist that administers epidurals in a hospital. I was actually fortunate enough to have one of the nurse anesthetist explain to me the process of administering an epidural while she was giving one to a patient. In the PCU/ICU I saw so many on the spot surgeries, which are emergency surgeries that have to happen in the patients room, and watch many nurse anesthetist put their patients to sleep while they explained the process and medicines to me. In the Oncology Unit, I learned about the numerous medicines the nurses use to alieve some of the pain the cancer patients go through. Over time, I was able to talk to many doctors who explained different medications and how it worked in the body to lessen the patients’ pain. All in all I realized that none of these jobs really interested me in any way. I was actually more interested with the physical therapy aspect that the PCU/ICU patients had to endure. As a result, the