Your most eye opening volunteer experience.

[preMedDonut]

So I enrolled in a volunteer program to help mentor young kids who are in a under-privileged area. I won't list the program name for anonymity reasons, but basically it's a program where 5th-8th graders are consistently having disciplinary issues and are placed in this group to help turn them around. Part of the program was taking them out to a one week camp and basically give them a semi-boot camp and enlightening on their own lives with no interference from the outside world. Even though I did the whole military stuff, it amazes me to this day that life can still throw you curve balls and make you think about life differently.

The past week I got to step into some of the doors into a couple of childrens lives and after showing them a big brother/dad attitude towards them (stern, but caring) I got to look into how crazy their life was. Such as them being in a gang and getting shot at, seeing their own friends die, and a mom not letting their own son do anything at all (not even go outside for summer) because she is a control freak. This was such a empowering experience that I feel helped me really take a different stance on my own life especially being out in nature with no technology. I am keeping this brief by the way.

My question to you all, did you have any specific eye opening volunteer experiences that at first you were doing for medical school admissions, but became so involved (physically and mentally) into it that it made you think differently?

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[armpitsOFmight]

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[DocVapor]

My eye opening experience was when I first started volunteering on the rescue squad, and my very first call (before i had any training) was a code. My job was to hold the pt's husband back so that he wouldn't interfere with the resuscitation efforts. Looking into the eyes of a man who's partner for 40 years was about to leave him is an experience that was burned into my memory. I've worked codes and seen terrible things since, but I could probably count on one hand the times where things changed the way I thought about life in an instant. Some of them were even extremely positive experiences, such as the courage of children, etc.

Of course, anyone in the medical field is going to have these experiences. But they are the ones that have affected me the most.

Nope...I hate volunteering for anything.

Except volunteering your opinions, obviously.

 

[TriagePreMed]

Never had an eye opening volunteering experience because I grew up in poor neighborhoods with gangs and stuff and then worked in mental health some time, but it felt good to give back to my community.

 

[armpitsOFmight]

^Did you hang out with the West Coast Massive Squad?

 

[Chip N Sawbones]

Working on the Christian missionary and bookstore ship Logos Hope was very eye opening for me. I got my left eye opened twice and my right eye once when I caught metal splinters in them. We were doing so much grinding and rust removing that half the deck department got dinged with eyeball splinters at some point. Each time I was all right after a few days of walking around with an eye patch enduring pirate jokes from my shipmates.

 

[wholeheartedly]

When I saw you had posted I thought you were going to blow everyone away by telling amazing stories about helping people around the globe on one of the ships...... this wasn't quite what I had in mind. And yet, I'm not surprised

Working on the Christian missionary and bookstore ship Logos Hope was very eye opening for me. I got my left eye opened twice and my right eye once when I caught metal splinters in them. We were doing so much grinding and rust removing that half the deck department got dinged with eyeball splinters at some point. Each time I was all right after a few days of walking around with an eye patch enduring pirate jokes from my shipmates.

 

[darwinmed]

An eye-opening experience doesn't necessarily have to involve a "plight of the poor" epiphany. I've been lucky to have had quite a few mind-broadening experiences, and one of the most salient was working for a summer with a group of really, really rich kids. The kids who go to Exeter and Hotchkiss, whose parents bring in seven-figures a year. The kids that most of us consider spoiled. And they were, in the material sense.

But it also hit me, in a way that I'm not going to do a good job of articulating, that these 15-year-olds are just like any other 15-year-old. They're all just kids trying to figure out how this crazy world works, and their place in it. Sure, they had everything money could buy, that I couldn't even imagine growing up. Lots of times, though, they didn't have what money can't buy, that I had in abundance. Many of them were sent to this camp just because boarding school was out and their parents didn't want to deal with them for the summer, and they all were rather acutely aware of that, even if nobody mentioned it. I always knew that my parents loved me, even if I didn't get a brand new BMW for my 16th birthday.

Like I anticipated, I really couldn't capture this experience in words, but it was really powerful and still affects...I guess how I interpret the world? Gah, I hope words come more easily when it comes to writing my PS

 

[Chip N Sawbones]

When I saw you had posted I thought you were going to blow everyone away by telling amazing stories about helping people around the globe on one of the ships...... this wasn't quite what I had in mind. And yet, I'm not surprised

Well, most of my time on the ships was when they were in shipyards getting repaired. I did fifteen months on the Logos Hope when the ship was being converted from a car ferry and seven months on the hospital ship Africa Mercy when we replaced the generators. The Africa Mercy was functioning as a surgical hospital in Sierra Leone for about a week just before I left, but I spent most of that time shadowing the orthopods. As a result, all my work was only indirectly helping people. I was building cabins, fixing lifeboats and installing hospital equipment that would (hopefully) be used by a different crewmember to do something useful to actually help someone. I don't have very good people skills, so I was mostly happy with this arrangement. If you want dramatic eye-opening stories of gigantic tumors getting removed, the blind seeing and the lame walking, I can introduce you to the doctors and nurses who made that happen. While they were doing that, I was busy trying to fix the bread slicer before lunchtime so they could have sandwiches to eat.

 

[wholeheartedly]

Still sounds awesome to me.

I think it's cool when ppl find a niche they love, that fits.

Most of my eye opening experiences have come from things other than volunteering, like my job or just life experience. Not exactly positive ones either.

I was sitting in a hospital room with my mom, some family friends, and one of the sweetest kindest people I know (the pt.) . The doctor came in and asked if he could talk to her and if she wanted her guests to leave. She asked if we could stay, so we did. I knew what was coming because my mom had mentioned her friend's weird lab values, but when he started telling her that she might have cancer...... well, that's not an experience you ever forget, watching someone's world get shattered. Watching the emotions and confusion play over her face, watching the doctor gently talk to her, the way it didn't sink in even after he left despite him being very clear, repeating himself, talking about setting up the appt. with the heme/onc doctor. That's something that will stay with me.

Hearing the code pager go overhead as I'm walking out the door to start my days off only to stop to hear what room, and if it was one of our patients. Peds floor, 4 month old, had only been getting about 2 units of blood a day from us, down from his usual, and oh btw it's Mother's Day, nobody in my group had met this kind, most hadn't seen him, but we all were familiar with him and had worked on his stuff since he was born, not a dry eye in the lab when I walked out.

 

[TLAD123]

Mine was on a spring break trip to Memphis, TN where we helped out at SOS (service over self). We were broken down into teams of 6-8, assigned a group leader, and given a job of repairing some facet of an inner city individual's home. What was eye opening was that amidst what I had always perceived the inner city to be (slummy, ghetto, whatever else you could use to describe as undesirable), there are great people, rich and poor, trying to make a difference. I grew up in a small rural town so this was something I hadn't truly been exposed to.

 

[Patassa]

Spent a month on the coast of Lake Victoria in Kenya with my wife, living at a day care for orphans and high risk kids, working at a local missions hospital. It was both heaven and hell each day.