Volunteer at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek: “You have very beautiful moments with people”

Friday is dedicated to Henk Eising at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (AVL), the cancer institute of the Netherlands. As a volunteer, Henk transports patients from the nursing departments to the research areas: “It teaches you very well to put things into perspective, because ultimately only a few things are important, of which health is the most important. You realize this when you walk out of here healthy again.”For four years, Henk has been a volunteer at the Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek. That is also where I meet Henk. I step inside slightly nervous, not knowing what to expect. However, it’s not the misery that catches my attention, but the pleasant atmosphere that prevails. For Henk, this was one of the reasons to start as a volunteer at the AVL. “I came here because my wife had an encounter with cancer. We lived in Badhoevedorp and whenever you cycle from there to Amsterdam, you pass by the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. It always had this feeling of ‘wow, you don’t want to end up there,’ but at some point, we had to come in and then you get a big shock and wonder what will happen and how bad it will be. But what impressed us was the fantastic atmosphere, treatment, kindness, and communication of everyone here at the AVL. My wife is completely cured now, and when I was approaching retirement, I wanted to do some volunteer work. I heard from someone that they were still looking for people here, so I started doing that.”Photo: Jackie Mulder[/caption]

Beautiful conversations, stories, and emotions

“Many of my fellow volunteers have started doing this work for similar reasons. Together with 40 others, we transport patients from the nursing wards to examination rooms on a bed and back again. You spend quite some time with them because we go to the room, then the bed needs to be prepared, then the whole journey, and eventually back. Beautiful conversations, stories, and emotions arise during these moments. That’s what makes the work so beautiful and special. You don’t have the feeling of ‘oh my god, cancer: everyone is almost dead or dead’ because that’s not the case. There are also people who are improving or have had a successful operation or who don’t feel sick. You have very special moments with these people. Some patients have sad stories, of course, but others are very funny and nice or have very beautiful stories. Humor is a very important aspect, also for those people to hold on to.”

Valuable for nursing and patients

With this work, Henk and his colleagues take a lot of work off the hands of the nursing staff and laboratory technicians, but it is also valuable for the patients. “Don’t forget that this is actually the only moment when people leave that room. They are often already happy to be driven through the hospital a bit. Besides, the nursing staff is extremely busy so they don’t always have time to talk to those people. We do have that going on during the ride. You can also notice that in them, and you often get feedback that they found it a nice or pleasant conversation. When they then hear that we are volunteers, they say ‘oh, that’s amazing, that you can do that and that you do it.’ Then I say: ‘well, it’s not that difficult, we are just having a normal conversation now.'”

Hands on the bed!

“There are always a few cases that really stick with you and that you don’t forget so easily for some reason,” Henk says. Henk wrote a book about some of the things he has experienced: Hands-on the bed! “In the meantime, I had already experienced a number of things here and I thought, ‘wow, that would be nice to write about.’ Then I thought, what if I try to make stories out of that? Maybe it will eventually turn into a book, and that’s what happened. I self-published it to maximize the proceeds for the AVL Foundation. The book received a lot of media attention and as a result, it was a great success. Furthermore, I received a lot of appreciation for it. It’s not an unpleasant book full of sickness and misery. Those few things are in there, but also the nice things. Just how we as volunteers experience our work. The book provides a nice behind-the-scenes look at the AVL, and that’s what I wanted to convey in those stories.”Henk’s book is still available for order via [link].www.henkeising.com

Would you like to do volunteer work too?

Here you will find an overview of volunteer tasks in Amsterdam. There are more than a thousand of them. For everyone’s talent and schedule.Search online or make an appointment with one of our mediators..Text: Kiki Dusebout