Various Chemotherapy Sessions

RUNNING HEAD: SOCIOLOGY 0
FILM REFLECTION: WIT 2001

SOCIOLOGY 2
Part 1
Therapeutic care to a person is all about effective communication to the targeted person that
helps in the channelizing the emotions of the person towards positivity. In the Movie, a English
literature professor suffers from the stage 4 Ovarian cancer that made her hospitalized for several
weeks as she has to go through various chemotherapy sessions. According to ledema & Piper,
effective communication is one of the best forms of mental and physical healing as
communication is helps in channelizing the emotions towards positivity (ledema & Piper,
2015). An individual is able to express all the sorrows related to the mental and physical pain,
he is suffering from. In the definition, effective communication involves the verbal and non-
verbal aspects of an individual’s expressions. The WIT movie was shot in a hospital where the
protagonist goes through the treatment of her stage 4 ovarian cancer. As Ovarian cancer is not so
common and treatment for it is was not available so the Vivian , cancer patient was convinced by
the group of physicians to treat her as a matter of study to understand the effectiveness of the
drugs on this incurable diseases.
During the phase of her disease, there are various episodes of effective and non- effective
communication with the patient. As the physicians at the hospital treated Vivian as the matter of
study, she was frequently asked about how she was feeling or is she all right that caused an
enormous amount of mental pain to her. This instance reflects the ineffective communication of
the medical staff with Vivian and she knew that the sole motive behind it was, for them to ensure
whether their experiments on her are successful or not. Such rude questions or ineffective
communication affected her self-esteem and made her feel nobody but a specimen for their
study. With their questions, she got accustomed to saying simply cold-hearted “fine” (The
Business Communication , 2019). In the movie, every week Vivian was exposed to the
treatment that continued for four hours in a row and every time after the session was over, she
was asked the same question that how she feels, she believes that such questions have become
automatic reactions of every medical staff after the treatment. There is no intentional desire from
the medical staff to know that that how a person is feeling . According to Levett-Jones,
Therapeutic relationship includes the components of trust and empathy where patient is able to
develop good and meaningful conditions with the medical staff (Levett-Jones, 2014). In the
movie, there is ineffectively of communication with the patient where the non-verbal cues of the

SOCIOLOGY 3
doctors and other medical staff depicts the lack of empathy. In various instances, when Vivian
was in a desperate need of knowing about her medical conditions with the doctor, she tried
making an eye contact with them for the motive of asking whether she would get recovered, on
which the doctors could be seen rolling off their eyes from her. According to Reader & Gillespie,
non-verbal cues formed the most important part of an effective communication as it conveys
more than 80 percentage of the message (Reader & Gillespie, 2014). The ineffective non-
verbal cues from various medical staff could be reason that the vivan felt highly dissatisfied
during the phase of her treatment (Redlandshospital, 2019).
On one hand, there was lack of expressions from the doctors while on other hand there was warm
connection showed by Nurse Susie to Vivian (Burchard, 2012). In the movies, among the
medical staff, Nurse Susie was the only one who shared good therapeutic relations with Vivian.
Sussie and Vivian shares good relations as Sussie come early in the morning to visit Vivian and
enquire empathetically about her health. Whenever Susie gets to know that she did not sleep, she
used to ask her the reason of not sleeping. Many a times Vivian replies that the fear of
uncertainty kept her awake throughout night, on which Susie used to calm her down with good
conversation or by a gentle touch that conveys that everything will be fine. According to eapfrog
hospital, therapeutic relationship is all about the non- verbal cues where the patient is able to
sense the care provided to by medical staff (Leapfrog hospital, 2019). The therapeutic
relation was completely comprehensible in the case Susie. Susie’s way of initiating a good and
honest conversation and her gentle touch was depictive of her therapeutic care towards the
patient. In one of the instances, Vivian complained to Susie about anxiety, on that Susie stayed
with Vivian whole night conversing with her so that she feels comfortable. She tried placating
Vivian with her soothing words so that she could sleep well.
Part B
Learning about the effective therapeutic and professional communication from the movie-
The Movie Wit had been a great learning platform for initiating effective therapeutic and
professional communication (Australian government, 2019). I have understood that patient’s
recovery is based more on the effective communication than simply providing them with the
medical treatment. I have learned that one of the most important things for an effective