Hello friends!
My name is Anita Oman, and I am a rising junior Nursing major with a Spanish minor as well as a future Resident Assistant and former Service and Justice Coordinator at UP. I have also been a part of the Community Service Work Study program, so the Moreau Center has been my second home during these past two years. I am originally from Santa Maria, CA which is where I am fulfilling my internship.
I am currently stationed at two different locations in Santa Maria. One is the Marian Regional Medical Center, where I work in the Surgery Waiting Room as well as doing ensuring patient satisfaction by visiting patients regularly. My job entails a lot of face-to-face patient and family interaction, which I will expand on later. I am also working for an organization called the Fund for Santa Barbara, which is a community fund that provides financial assistance to different community organizations that are addressing needs our community faces. This has been my first time working with the “behind the scenes” aspects of social justice as most of the previous social justice work I have done has been very hands on, working directly with effected communities and affecting immediate and tangible change.
In the following paragraphs, I will be speaking about an experience I had last week during my time at Marian. I’ve had a lot of awesome and challenging experiences so far at both positions, but this one spoke to me in a way that none of the others have yet. It was a Tuesday night, and on Tuesday nights I go around to every patient room on every floor with a cart full of books, magazines, newspapers, coloring books, and other things that make being stuck in a hospital more comfortable for people. I also teach people how to use their televisions, get them food or drinks, and just generally do what I can to make the traumatic experience of being in a hospital a little better. On these nights, a lot of what I do is very active, walking around to grab things for people, moving quickly from room to room so that I can visit everyone before my shift is over.
On this particular Tuesday, it was towards the middle of my shift and I was speaking to a nurse about which patients I should and shouldn’t visit in her pod. It was dinner time, so most of the patients didn’t need anything from me. However, she did ask if I could sit in with a patient while she ate because she was easily confused and got scared when eating alone. I agreed, went into the room, introduced myself and sat down in a chair next to the bed. The patient was in her late 90’s, able to feed herself but clearly shaky and confused. From what I gathered from her slurred, slow speech, her two kids lived far away and couldn’t come visit her often.
Despite the two of us not speaking much, the silence in the room was never awkward. It was peacefully quiet, and broken by the occasional clicking of her IV tube against the bed as she looked over at me mid-bite to make sure I was still there. When she was finished eating, she looked at me and asked me to take her tray away, so I got up to leave. As I was leaving the room, she said goodbye and called me by her daughter’s name with a small but clear smile on her face.
This interaction, although it took little effort on my part, was remarkable for me. I have never experienced that level of comfort in silence with somebody I did not know. A silence so comfortable for both of us that I could be mistaken by her for a daughter. It was a necessary reminder for me that sometimes, all people need is someone to sit with them and just be. No conversation, no running around to get them something. Just being a comforting and open presence in solidarity with their struggle. I hope that it will be a reminder also to all of you that the ministry of presence is powerful, sometimes more powerful than words.
In solidarity,
Anita