As I was leaving, Guy Chapman, the unit’s clinical customer service coordinator, stopped me to share a story. They recently had a patient from Hawaii. Knowing that Okundaye plays ukulele, Chapman arranged for her to serenade the patient and his wife, who was visiting on the couple’s wedding anniversary. The patient requested something by the Ramones. Consulting the library on her iPad, the only title Okundaye found was “I Wanna Be Sedated.”
“So she starts playing and singing, and the wife starts singing, I start singing,” Chapman said. “His whole demeanor changed, he was laughing and smiling. By the time Nicole left he said: ‘You have no idea how much that cheered me up. I was bummed out I was in here for my anniversary, but there we were rocking out to a ukulele playing ‘I Wanna be Sedated’ — in a hospital.’”
When I entered the Medical Intensive Care Unit, Okundaye was already seated in the doorway of Amanda Omans’ room, scrolling through her iPad for the lyrics and chords to Guns N’ Roses’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Omans was under contact precautions requiring anyone entering her room to gown up and wear gloves, so Okundaye delivered her concert from the hallway.
Over the pearly accompaniment of a ukulele, the song rang out sunny and sweet. On the chorus, Omans’ lips moved in sync with the lyrics. When the nurses in the corridor broke out in applause, Omans grinned and raised a hand in a rock ‘n’ roll salute.
After a final request of Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One,” I donned gloves and gown so I could get close enough to hear Omans speak. She apologized for her brittle voice; she was running out of gas. But, she said, “music always helps with the pain.” She said it was “very exciting” to receive a personalized concert of songs that were so meaningful to her. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” made her think of her daughter. The Twain song was how she felt about her partner of 20 years.
The importance of requests — what scientific studies call self-selected music — turns out to be crucial in health care applications. In part, it relates to the issue of consent and confers agency on people who, as Vocke said in the peer support session earlier, “don’t often get to say no in the course of their day.”