The hospice philosophy was founded on a mission to provide comprehensive and holistic services to individuals at the end of life. Hospice interdisciplinary teams work together to offer therapies such as spiritual services, comfort care, and massage therapy to meet patients' physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual needs. Although the hospice philosophy is guided toward patient-centered care, limited research has examined how patients understand holistic care services. Through a social constructionist lens and qualitative interviews, we examined hospice patients' understandings of holistic care and argue that these perceptions of care are constructed through the biomedical model of medicine.

In this article, I tell the story of an interview encounter I had in a previous study with a hospice patient. Even though I had prepared for our interaction, Meredith corrected me for all my false steps. I offer my account of the tense beginning of our interview and Meredith's lectures, which transitioned into an invitational moment and a marked change in our interaction. While I cannot know what was inside Meredith's mind that day, I read this experience as a lesson in research methods. As such I advocate for restructuring the way we, as health communication researchers, gather patient-centered data. I contend that we must not only allow, but encourage and facilitate patients' narratives through narrative interviewing. The findings from the current ethnography are offered for use as rationale in future narrative interview studies.