Music has the power to comfort people who are getting palliative care and help them and their loved ones get through a very sad and hard time.
Melanie Ambler, a musician and medicine student at Stanford University, is doing a project to look into how music can help relieve some of that stress. Ambler is not going to school for a year so that she can talk to 100 patients and play music for them.
Ambler goes to each person’s hospital room, asks them a question, and then plays a new song on her cello for them while she is there.
“I like to tell my patients that I play music that is improvised and inspired by whatever they tell me,” he said. “It’s my most active form of listening.”
The 46-year-old Tasha Tevis is in the ICU when Ambler meets her. Tevis has end-stage renal failure. Tevis was asked a question by Ambler to start the meeting. Ask the person, “What does art mean to you?” “Art is beauty to me,” said Tevis.
Ambler started to play her cello after Tevis was done on the mic. When Tevis closed her eyes, she forgot she was in the hospital for a moment. “I feel so happy,” Tevis said. “When you take a deep breath, everything washes away.”
This is more than just a nice thing to do for these people. Ambler thinks it’s real medicine. It’s something she’s researching how the experience affects the patients and their families by making them feel.
After their session, all of the patients get a recording of their conversation with music that has been edited. Then, some of those talks will be put together in a podcast or album that anyone can listen to.
Most doctors are interested in keeping people alive, but Ambler hopes that her project will change the way doctors think about death.
“We should have more conversations around death and dying and palliative care and what that actually means,” Ambler said. “A lot of the stories the patients are telling have nothing to do with the reason they are in the hospital.” It has to do with the kind of people they are.
