Nov 11, 2019
“I don’t always know what the right thing is to say to someone who just attempted suicide. But what I do know is that hospital rooms are boring and lonely and scary. I also know that sometimes we all just want to be seen. I wasn’t the nurse, and she wasn’t the patient. We were just two girls laughing together.”
Nursing student Chelsea Huffhines describes the importance of connecting with patients, person to person, which can happen over a simple bubble bath. This essay placed third in the 2019 Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest and was published in the October 2019 issue of Academic Medicine. Read the essay at academicmedicine.org.