Volunteering in a Pediatric ER

Before deciding to pursue medicine, I volunteered in a pediatric ER a short walk from my college. Why? Mainly because an upperclassman, a lanky frat boy named David, told me I should do it if I wanted to get into medical school. He told me—with a laugh—that he spent most of his volunteering time, one hundred and fifty hours in total, sitting on a chair, playing on his phone.

I didn’t agree with his attitude, but I understood the waiting, the desire to be anywhere else. I’m sure some of the doctors felt the same. During a shift, one of the residents, a tall guy with what seemed like deliberately unkempt long hair, kept talking about his new 3D printer. He told the typing residents sitting in the workstations around him that it was going to reinvent medicine. His voice would get high towards the end of the speech before he sank back down in his chair to stare back at his computer screen. I wondered why he was in a pediatric ER dealing with asthma and acute diarrhea, but I never had the courage to ask.

When I first got there, they handed me a large maroon jacket and an ID card—just enough to assure the patients I wasn’t stealing medical supplies but also signaling that I wouldn’t be useful in getting them out any faster. The ID had my picture and some kind of employee number. I couldn’t even buzz into the ER with it. I usually followed someone else who happened to be going through the doors. I quickly learned to act like I belong so no one would question why I was there. Especially since I had an ID and a jacket.

My job consisted of going room to room, asking the parents and children if they needed anything such as blankets, food, or crayons. It mattered how I asked, I found. If I just offered food, they would decline. If I described a chicken sandwich and ginger ale, they usually accepted.

Patients and their families would often be held up for a couple of hours in the waiting room, then again once they actually got a room, until a doctor showed up. When I knocked on the door their faces always held similar expressions: a mixture of boredom, concern, and helplessness. I hoped that my sandwiches would help them get through the experience. Break up the monotony of staring at nurses walking by again and again, wondering when someone would open the door, look them in the eye, and ask them how they were doing. The ginger ale came with ice that lasted a while. Most people asked for another.

As a volunteer, no one really notices you. Not the nurses. Not the doctors. That’s the good thing—you do what you want. Make-your-own-job. For me, that became trying to make the patient’s inevitable wait seem less terrible. But I also wanted to see medicine in action, how doctoring works.

The doctors barely recognized the existence of anyone who was not immediately useful to them. Except for a doctor who wore a blue fleece vest over his green scrubs. He would often bring me along to see patients. He was a teacher—the best kind of doctor. He taught me about how to prepare for trauma cases. How to build teamwork. What to look for in an exam. That happy nurses were the secret to a good workplace.

I once saw him lead a team during a trauma case. In my time, I only saw a couple of ambulance-blaring trauma cases. Most of the cases a doctor sees in an ER are routine medical problems: strep throat, asthma, a viral infection. Boring, routine stuff for an ER doc. But once the trauma chime went off, those docs would fly off their chairs. I could practically see the adrenaline dripping down their foreheads, veins bulging with the tension.

Fleece-vest doctor led the case that day. A teenager had been hit by a car. During it, he never once lost his cool—efficient and compassionate. He also talked to the teen the whole time, explaining each step as he assessed the extent of the injury. The teen couldn’t respond, but he seemed to be listening, grunting as a form of communication. In the end he lived and was lucky enough to walk again.

Other families weren’t so lucky. Once, a baby was brought in by ambulance because it had stopped breathing for a few minutes and was resuscitated by an EMT. In the trauma room they tried to stabilize the child, no more than six months old. I walked away after a few minutes. Another patient’s mother, watching the action from down the hall, pulled me aside to ask what had happened to the baby. Did it survive? I told her I didn’t know. She looked me right in the eye and told me there was a lot of trauma in losing a child, that it had happened to her. I didn’t know what to say. I just knew how to ask about sandwiches in Spanish. Maybe fleece-vest doctor would have known what to say.

I took a long break to clear my head, walking around the long, empty halls. A soft wind blew from somewhere through the bare corridors of the labyrinth of buildings.  By the time I got back, the nurses and doctors were back in their normal positions. The patient and his family had gone to another wing of the hospital, I hoped.

Another time, fleece-vest doctor brought me to the room of a little girl around five years old. She was in the sicker section of the ER with a tube sticking out of her arm. She asked for paper and crayons to color. I gave her some. But she needed more—she kept drawing and drawing. She drew a picture of her mother. She drew a picture of me. Her mother, exhausted from the hours and angry at her boyfriend for not showing up, left for a bit and went out to smoke. She asked me if I would watch her daughter. Her daughter seemed not to notice and just continued to draw. And talk. And draw some more. I got more paper and crayons. I even drew a little myself. Her masterpiece of the day was a drawing of herself in the hospital room. In the drawing, a sun poked out of the corner and the little girl in the hospital bed, with a tube sticking out of her arm, had a small smile on her face.