BENGALURU: My name is Jennifer Crawford. I graduated in 2007 with a degree in social service, majoring in psychology and community health. I work for Wish One Wish (WOW) where we visit terminally ill patients and ask them to make a wish which we try to fulfil. WOW is not the only organisation of its kind but I loved the staff and so I joined.
My first assignment was at South End Cancer Hospital. Our tenure at a hospital is three weeks. The first few days, we talk to the patients and get familiar. We explain our mission and ask them to ‘wish one wish.’ All the ‘wishes’ are collected and analysed. The last ten days, we ‘fulfil’ the wishes. Analysis is done for logistics – if three of the patients want to watch a movie, we put them in a group. We enter the ‘wishes’ in our database and categorise them. That’s my job.
At South End, we had two major groups – the children’s group and the oldies. I expected to see a difference in the choices of wishes. The analysis phase has nothing to do with analysis but I couldn’t avoid some analysing, given my psychology background.
I hate to admit, but I’m terrible with names. I met every patient in South End and spoke to each one for over an hour but I hardly remembered three names. If I had a wish on my computer screen that said: Joe Redford – “I want to meet my brother Jim in Texas,” I really don’t remember Joe. I know I met him but I can’t fix a face to the name.
The wishlist from South End was sent to me for analysis. I categorised them and created action plans. Some wanted to go to the circus and some wanted a bar of chocolate. Many of the wishes were simple and innocent. There were some serious ones too. Someone wanted to get rid of air pollution, another wanted to stop wars forever.
I created a set of ‘action items’ for all those wishes that could be fulfilled. All those global peace and ozone layer wishes are obviously beyond the scope of our foundation. I decided to go back to those patients and ask them to wish for something more practical.
I walked out of my room into the narrow vestibule as I thought, “It’s so easy to handle young children – all they want is a trip to the circus or a ride on an airplane.” I handed the patient list to Regina and explained to her that I needed to meet those patients. She glanced through the list as we walked towards the ward. Then she whispered to herself, “That’s weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“All these names come from the same ward.”
She motioned me to follow her. Within moments, we stood in front of a door with large bold letters on it that said ‘Children’s Ward.’
