Choosing to Be Here A speech for the Annual Laguna Honda Hospital Volunteers Luncheon,San Francisco, April 16, 1997   We are volunteers. We choose to be here. Everybody else at Laguna Honda Hospital is, in one way or another, a conscript of circumstance. The doctors and nurses, the orderlies and janitors, the dieticians and social workers -- all these professionals on the staff -- they have to be here. It's their job. They do it with skill and dedication, of course . . . but work is work and a job's a job, and anyone who has ever worked at a job knows just what I mean by this. They have to be here. The hospital exists for the patients, obviously, but we can't lose sight of the fact that almost none of them really want to be here, here in this place of pain and the indignities visited upon the sick. In view of their circumstances, Laguna Honda is probably the best possible place for them -- we all know that -- but we know too that it is a place for people who have run out of choices. Yes, the patients have to be here too. But we are different -- we are volunteers. We don't have to be here. We choose to be here, and this distinction betweeen have to and choose to makes all the difference in the world. The imperatives of "job" and "careers" simply don't apply to our work here. We try our best, of course, to "succeed" at what we do when we care for the sick and the lame and the dying, but isn't it wonderful that "success" for a volunteer, getting it "right," is achieved mainly just by showing up. We come, we do our somethings, our anythings -- help with meals, play some music, massage aching limbs, and in general comport ourselves as human beings -- and that's it: we have succeeded. Is this a great job, or what! For the patients especially, there is an enormous difference between our volunteer work and the professional work of the staff. All day long and all night, there are doctors and nurses and orderlies to tend to the hard facts that turn a person into a patient -- the broken limbs, the scrambled thoughts, the corrupted blood. We can only imagine what those white uniforms mean to the patients here: pain, at times, and relief from pain, grim reality and glimmers of hope. The white uniforms are inevitably a part of the landscape of sickness, and they are here because sickness is here. How could one of our patients think otherwise? But we are volunteers, emissaries from the normal world outside the hospital walls. We don't wear white uniforms; think how different we must look to the patients! We don't minister to their illnesses; we deal with their lives. Because as long as these patients can still draw breath, they are still people, and they need what all people need: a kindly touch, some humor, a sense of community and belonging and continuity, and especially love. They need the sort of attention that every person needs not because he is sick, but because he is human. And here's what's wonderful: we need it too, precisely because we are human, and we get it from the very people we came to serve. This is the open secret of volunteering. We are here because of our human need to give something of ourselves, of our spirits, to others, and what we encounter here is that very same fierce human need in our patients -- they need to give, too, and by accepting the fact of their lives and their humanity, we join with them in a healing circle that has nothing to do with medical charts or white uniforms or hospital walls. Consider: if you think it feels good to come here as a volunteer and serve others, think how good it must feel for someone who is sick and weary to serve you. If there is any measure of "success" in volunteering here, it will be found in the grace by which we let our patients, our friends, serve us. So, we are volunteers. Maybe we do have to be here after all.   © Michael Fleming Berkeley, California April, 1997   top of page   other essays   e-mail to Mike   Fox Paws home page