The trip to Dun Laoghaire to get to the National Rehabilitation Hospital isn’t exactly that long per se – a little over an hour and twenty give or take, which isn’t awful – it’s more the various methods of transport that it takes to do so. I start on the dart and look out the window like I’m pretending I’m in a music video, my eyes skipping the along with the twinkles of light reflecting off the surface of the blue coastal water. Next up is jockeying for a seat on the 46A which rolls through the sleepy suburb. After a few stops I’m on my feet and walking along quiet roads and empty soccer fields before I arrive at my final destination.
Arriving at the hospital almost always feels somewhat epic due to the display of mountains that serves as its background – well, mountains in Ireland, so maybe more hills, but you get the picture. It’s a bit of a breathtaking sight, and I always find myself a little in awe of the rolling green expanse that stretches before me upon entering. These shifts working as a speech language therapist with children recovering from brain injuries and strokes have become the highlight of my week – after training with the staff, I now get to sit and help guide young people as we work towards our shared goal of their recovery. This is a process I myself am all too familiar with; I remember recovering from my own brain injury and the slow, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding steps it takes to regain what natural instincts that had since been lost. Helping the kids has served as a reminder of one of the reasons why I’m in Ireland to begin with. As I will be attending medical school next year and training to become a physician, I wanted to see more of what healthcare looked like around the world in order to offer the most culturally sensitive and nuanced care.
But all such lofty goals are not on the top of my mind when I’m working with one of my favorite patients, an eight-year-old Sarah (and yes, the name has been anonymized so that we’re HIPAA compliant). Although Sarah cannot speak, she communicates using a machine that tracks her eye movements – we play games together, watch Moana (NEVER Frozen), and work to increase her ability to communicate. But sometimes the spasms set in, and we sit there holding each other’s hands until they pass. Coming here, to Ireland, has been so meaningful in so many ways, but especially in that it reminded me why I’ve embarked on the path I have – namely, the human moments of kindness and kinship I’ve had and how they’re influenced my decision to go into medicine. When I sit with Sarah and we work as a team, it’s not about any preconceived goal. Rather, it’s about offering my support, in the best way I can, to someone who needs it.
And Ireland has returned that to me in spades. I remember the first day I got to Trinity and was clearly unable to move all three of my gigantic bags, a stranger offered to help me find my room and with my luggage. After silencing my New York sensibilities that someone was trying to rob me, I was part of a total stranger’s act of kindness so unexpected but one that I felt has been repeated time and time again here: the bartender at my friend’s favorite pub, who knows I don’t like Guinness but doesn’t judge me for it and gifts me an extra G&T from time to time; in my friends from my Masters course staying up with me all night to finish a last minute assignment; in the stranger at the Camden who ran after me and my group after forgetting our photos at the photobooth. They’re small examples, sure, but they’ve been indicative of the small moments of connection that have helped me remember the person I want to be and the career I hope to pursue. For what is medicine, and life for that matter, if not a collection of well-told and hard-fought stories?