Summer Internship with Institute of Palliative Medicine — Nazreen from University of Nottingham
Daily Winner for: – 9th August 2012
Name of the intern: – Nazreen
Institute: – University of Nottingham
Organization interned with: – Institute of Palliative Medicine
When I started looking for internships, I had my mind set on getting into a publishing house or a newspaper (wanted to flex my journalistic muscles, you see). However, due to clashes with my exam dates and the internship period, I ended up abandoning that idea (for this year!) and instead decided to do something else.
I started working for the Institute of Palliative Care, Calicut, helping them develop their long-forsaken website. Palliative care is a much neglected field in medicine. Usually once patients are diagnosed with a terminal disease, doctors more or less give up on them and pack them off back to their homes. Thus, the last few months for these patients become pure agony and their quality of life is considerably reduced. Often these patients end up becoming ‘burdens’ for their families and start wishing for an earlier demise. Palliative care works towards providing total care to these patients, in their last few months, to ensure that they have a better quality of life and a relatively easier death.
Death is something we often avoid discussing as it makes us uneasy, but here death is all you talk about. It’s all about how to give a patient a death which he/she deserves — pain free and peaceful. My role in this internship was to talk to doctors, nurses, volunteers and patients and find out their story and write it for others to read. It’s inspiring to see volunteers who spend their time working for patients, talking to them, cheering them up — all for free! Then there are even more inspiring doctors who go beyond the call of duty and immerse themselves into giving these patients some peace.
Now I am thankful that I chose this organization to work with as they gave me much more than just a reference on my CV. They gave me appreciation for human life, the volunteers renewed my optimism in humanity and showed me that there’s still so much good in people. They taught me compassion and gave me lessons of love which I will treasure forever.
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