PERSONAL REFLECTION How being a tea-cart volunteer changed the way I see cancer patients and influenced my nursing practice

Abstract

Often when I tell people I volunteer at a cancer centre I get the response that most oncology nurses receive, “Isn’t that hard? And sad? Why do you volunteer there?” However, after two years of being a tea-cart volunteer, I have found that the main emotion expressed by both myself and the patients in our interactions is pure excitement over, yes, tea and cookies. When I started volunteering after my first year of nursing school, my volunteer hours piled up before my clinical hours. Therefore, volunteering was my first real interaction with cancer patients in the treatment setting.