Every Picture Tells a Story

Just not the story you think.

Pictured here is WXPN Musician On Call Volunteer Guide Trainer Extraordinaire, Kimberly Massengill, and one-third of the South Jersey band Showin' Tell, Nicolino. While the picture shows Kim doing her best Gene Simmons imitation, in homage to Nicolino's KISS tattoo, there really is so much more here than meets the eye.

In April, WXPN Musicians On Call launched at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center -- the only hospital in all of New Jersey to participate in this program that brings live music to the patient's bedside. At the launch April 18, we were thrilled to have New York Artist Kenli Mattus and our very own "Born at Lourdes" Birdie Busch. Both serenaded staff and guests and then went out to visit patients on our Rehab floor. Honestly, I never saw people so happy in a hospital before.

That event was where I first met Kim and learned she has trained all of the Musicians On Call guides. Since then, and for the last several weeks, she has taken the Amtrak down from New York to help train Lourdes volunteers as well. These individuals take time out of their lives to spend a few hours in the hospital, helping the musicians navigate the delicate social (and sometimes emotional) interactions that occur when you walk into a perfect stranger's hospital room. You never know what you will get. People are stressed, hurting, anxious. The guides need to be resilient people. Kim clearly has seen it all and is a great teacher.

I hung around these past few weeks to be sure no one got lost, but mostly got to stand back in awe and watch Kim do her thing. Through her I got to observe what true Southern hospitality is. Our guides are fantastic as well. We are very lucky.

I can't tell you how much this program has meant to the hospital. People have been touched by the time the volunteer guides and musicians have taken to be somewhere they could clearly have choosen not to be. I've watched from the hall as volunteer musicians make people smile when just a few minutes before they looked pretty stressed. I've watched patients and families listen together from an adjoining room, tapping their feet in silence and nodding their heads. The night this photo was taken, Showin' Tell played on our maternity floor. This was pretty exciting stuff. No one in the history of the Musician On Call program had played for a maternity unit before and everyone was pretty happy. One family had just welcomed a new baby and, as die-hard XPN fans, they were thrilled to learn they were getting a Musicians On Call performance. It was a nice celebration for them.

All of this is just the kind of transforming, healing experience we try to be a Lourdes. And we are grateful.