For volunteer Pat Carpenter, each day at the Community Health MD Anderson Cancer Center South is a little bit different.
He said the center's 15 volunteers are the “gofers,” the doers and the getters of the hospital. That means they escort hundreds of visitors, fetch lab results and push paperwork.
It keeps 86-year-old Carpenter busy and out of trouble at home, he said.
Volunteers also comfort people during tough times. Seven of them, including Carpenter, have survived cancer.
“We try to lighten the load, not only for the hospital and staff people here,” Carpenter said, "but we try to lighten the load, pick up some of that emotional load of the patients and their loved ones.”
Some patients stop by for quick exams, and others come in for weeks for radiation or chemotherapy. Carpenter said he feels like he’s part of a family at the center, often getting to know patients as they come for appointments.
Carpenter is also one of those patients.
“The big word, the C word, it scares us all to death,” Carpenter said. “It really isn't the end. There is hope.”
Community MD Anderson announced a more than $60 million expansion of the center south of Indianapolis with plans to double the patient load to meet demand.
As a member of the board and a volunteer, Carpenter said he gets an inside look at the time and effort the center’s personnel put in to help patients.
“To be a part of that bigger picture, to encourage people to say, ‘Hey, I'm part of that,’ that's important to me,” Carpenter said. “I could sit home and chit and whittle, but I really would prefer to be out where there is an investment down the road. That’s why I’m here.”
Volunteer Becky Horn feels the same way.
“I was retired for three years, and I just thought, I've got to get up and do something,” Horn said. “And it's the best thing I've ever done.”
Now, she said patients feel like family.
As a breast cancer survivor, Horn said she finds herself telling her story to patients. Thanks to a mammogram, doctors detected cancer far deeper than she could have found on her own.
“I'm always on to someone you know about getting that mammogram, even if it's a stranger on the street,” Horn said.
But it wasn’t her own cancer diagnosis that inspired her to volunteer. It was her daughter-in-law’s.
“Because she had to have radiation,” Horn said. “She had to have chemo. She lost her hair, you know. So going through all that, I thought, ‘I'm going to go work there, that way I can give back and support her also.’”
