I initially meant to write this post after I finished work on Thursday, but I was in Vermont without internet access until today. When I left the hospital on Thursday, our group had just raised a total of $100,000 since they began keeping track of the funds. This momentous occasion will hopefully help us win a hospital-wide award for innovation of medical care at HUP. If we do win, I will get to come back and accept the award with the other volunteers and Trish. This would be extremely significant because it would make the work public, that we have been doing. Then all of the other divisions at the hospital could adopt our system and begin having volunteers raise money.

Continue reading “I’m Done; Now What Does This Mean?” →

My senior project is almost over. This is my fourth week working at HUP and I only wish that my project could continue for another couple weeks. A typical day at the hospital is quite different from my an average school day. At the hospital, I may have a rush of patients and paperwork and be extremely busy for hours or I may have only a few to see and get some free time to catch up on old applications. There are no scheduled classes at scheduled times. The patients are usually in the hospital for a few hours leaving me a large window to visit them. Lunch is another difference. At Westtown, everyday I have lunch from 1-1:45, while at HUP my lunch happens whenever I have a small chunk of free time. I like my life while working at a hospital, more than when I’m at school. It will be initially very difficult to readjust to life at Westtown.

This morning, I arrived at work a little before 8:00 and I went down to get a cup of coffee as I always do. When I came back upstairs, one of the patient coordinators, Carolyn, was in my office with a nurse practitioner and a doctor. Carolyn could not stop coughing and she was  practically hyperventilating. After a few minutes of trying to stop her cough, we decided that I should take her to the ER so that she could use a nebulizer to stop her cough and diagnose her problem. One concerning element is that she has tested positive for Tuberculosis three times but does not have an active strand of the virus. She is not contagious and does not have any of the symptoms of the disease and most likely never will. Nevertheless, she was worried that this may have been the cause for her coughing. I was initially scared that I had contracted the serious disease from spending the morning with her but in the end, her chest x-ray showed no sign of TB, pneumonia or bronchitis. I was greatly relieved and later realized that if there was any risk that she had active tuberculosis she would have immediately been quarantined. But if the next time I get a TB test it comes out positive, I’ll know who to blame.

-Matt

p.s. this is my penultimate post. There will be one more this Thursday.

Today was a good day. It all started this morning on the train ride into Philadelphia. I realized that I had done the calculations incorrectly yesterday. I forgot that I did not work last Friday, so my hundredth hour was going to happen this morning. This reinvigorated me and gave me a mission to start the day off with. I was going to contact all of the organizations that I had applied to the previous week to find out if my patients had been approved for their grants. Unfortunately, most of the places that I called were not open at 8 am so my calls went straight to voicemail. Then Trish arrived and told me to contact the Hope Lodge, a facility that houses patients that to come to the hospital regularly and live far away. I was able to help extend a patient’s stay for 51 days. The approximate cost to stay at the lodge is $190 per night. But the patients don’t have to pay, so we saved her $9,690 in total. Within minutes after I found this out, Trish told me that another patient that I spoke to yesterday would be approved for his respite vacation. This is a $5,000, week-long, all-expense paid DisneyWorld vacation for him and his family. His two children have never gone on a real vacation before and this will be there chance. Our hope is that this will give his children a happy memory of their father before he passes away. I am extremely excited to tell them this news on Friday, when the decision becomes official. This raised my grand total to $22,000 in 100 hours, which is twice my initial goal for the entire project. My next goal is to earn an additional  $10,000 during my last week. This is very likely to happen because my other patients will most likely receive the two $5,000 respite vacations and the two $6,700 chemotherapy co-pay assistance grants that I have applied for.

This afternoon while I was looking at the list of patients that were in the clinic, I noticed a familiar name. I had gotten this elderly patient free Philadelphia Phillies tickets this past summer. I was thrilled to know that he was still alive as most of the patients that I saw during the summer had passed away. When I went to his room, he and his wife immediately recognized me and thanked me for the baseball tickets. They told me that he had received proton therapy and was now completely cancer-free. It is amazing to know that the new advancements of medicine are actually elongating patient’s lives and helping to eradicate cancer. This visit only made my day better, it was the icing on the cake. After work, I decided to treat myself to some well deserved ice cream. Today was not a good day; today was a great day.

-Matt