{"id":4943,"date":"2025-08-14T13:32:19","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T18:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/?p=4943"},"modified":"2025-08-14T13:40:26","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T18:40:26","slug":"more-about-last-writers-interview-with-fellow-michael-xie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/more-about-last-writers-interview-with-fellow-michael-xie\/","title":{"rendered":"More About Last Writers: Interview with Fellow Michael Xie"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/span><\/div>

What drew you to the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship (ASF)?<\/strong>
\nMy Fellowship partner, Ruhi, knew a Baylor student in the class above us who was part of ASF. We thought that we had a pretty good idea, but we needed some guidance on how to make our dream a reality. That\u2019s how we came across ASF.<\/p>\n

Why did you pick the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VA) as your project site?<\/strong>
\nWe knew we wanted to focus on end-of-life care and mental health. Up until last year, there weren\u2019t any opportunities for Baylor College of Medicine students to work with veterans in the service setting. And we thought that veterans might be a special population to explore the concept of end of life and a legacy after you pass away. We found really good support with the palliative care doctors at the VA.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the goal of your project?<\/strong>
\nOur goal is twofold. So one is we want to help veterans on palliative care or hospice to have a bit more closure when it comes to the end of their life; maybe talk about things they were uncomfortable talking about before, but now they have more headspace to do so. And also, we want to help train our peers on how to deal with end-of-life topics since every doctor will have to deal with that at one point or another.<\/p>\n<\/div>

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How did you approach the project and getting to know the community better?<\/strong>
\nWe had a lot of help from our site mentor, Dr. Leanne Jackson. She knows all of her patients really well, and by connecting with her and getting to talk to her, we got to know the needs of the veterans that we\u2019re serving better.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s been a big takeaway or impact on you from this experience so far?<\/strong>
\nI think the biggest takeaway is how fearless a lot of these veterans are when they are dealing with terminal illnesses. They\u2019re very enthusiastic to talk about their lives, not only the highs but also the lows. It\u2019s been really rewarding to see how much they enjoy the process of finding closure by talking to someone who will really sit there and listen to them.<\/p>\n

Is there a special story you\u2019d like to share from your project?<\/strong>
\nOne story is something that happened to my project partner, Ruhi. She paired up with a veteran who, unfortunately, passed away during the process of writing his memoir. She was very sensitive and brave in finishing up the story with his family. She attended the funeral and got to know the family a bit better by having a meal with them. It\u2019s very encouraging to see these human-to-human relationships that would not have otherwise existed.<\/p>\n

Anything else you\u2019d like to add?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019d like to say that ASF has been really instrumental in helping us make this project a reality. Without their support, we wouldn\u2019t be able to publish these memoirs and send physical copies to their families as something they can keep for decades to come to remember their loved ones.<\/p>\n

About Michael Xie:<\/strong>
\nMichael Xie is a first-year medical student at Baylor College of Medicine. He is from Dallas, Texas, but moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study the history of science at Harvard University, where he was heavily involved in homeless outreach, medical humanities, and global health advocacy. He spent a year before medical school in Seattle working on climate change and health medical education and volunteering at a clinic serving homeless youth. Michael enjoys running, hiking, swimming, reading, and attending art museums and independent coffee shops. As an ASF Fellow, he is working on a brand-new project focused on helping veterans in hospice or palliative care write memoirs about their storied lives. Along with the other volunteers and his project partner, Ruhi Thapar, he hopes to break the stigma around planning a good death and to promote a more humanistic side of medicine.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4944,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4943"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4949,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4943\/revisions\/4949"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon.dev\/projects\/schweitzer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}