"I know my life is improved because of my patients."

Moving to Philadelphia has been the most exciting event in my life. It has also been an incredibly challenging, eye-opening and frightening experience as well. I left Minnesota and abandoned everyone I knew and everything with which I had grown up; all my worldly possessions were pared down to two luggage bags; and got on the plane with the notion from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that Philadelphia was nothing but a dangerous playground. With an unavoidable certainty, Philadelphia is living up to its claim as the “City of Brotherly Love” and slowly becoming my home, thanks in no small part to the patients I serve on a daily basis.

Over the past three months, I have been invited to dinner and given great bear hugs with such frequency that I’m beginning to look at my clients more as family than I am as patients. The compassion and the goodwill of the human spirit has never been more on display than in my time at Abbottsford-Falls (and to think the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air had me worried).

I have learned more lessons in grace and compassion than I have given in food stamps and insurance. Humility has become my biggest advocate, allowing me to extend a hand of humanity to those who need it but are often too proud to ask. Instead of remaining a skeptic, callous to the notion of circumstance, my clients have illustrated that misfortune can befall anyone, especially in the world today. So it is not my patients that I pity, but those who cannot see past the hardships that bind the hands and handicap the potential of those struggling. For when someone sees an unemployed young woman, I now see a full-time mother of three who is trying to establish a platform for her children to succeed.

Now, when people see what I do and say, “It must really help you appreciate the things in your life,” I agree, but for a fundamentally different reason. I do not look at my clients and think, I am so glad for what I have and what they don’t. Instead, I know my life is improved because of my patients.  Because my clients allow me to revel in their most recent adventures when they visit.  Because my clients make my service a personally meaningful experience. And definitely because, at the end of the day, when I leave service, I know I am a better man, a better advocate, and a better citizen.
 

This post was written by PHC member Nolan Anderson.
Nolan serves at the Family Practices and Counseling Network - Abbottsford Falls as a Health and Benefits Advocate.