In one of my earlier blog entries, No lo olvides , I talk about how important it is for a native English-speaker who lives and works in a primarily English-speaking environment to seek out various sources to help maintain her second language knowledge. To keep knowledge of my second language, Spanish, alive, I talked about reading online Spanish newspapers, Spanish blogs and books, perusing medical Spanish websites, listening to Spanish radio and watching telenovelas en Español. I even listed a personal favorite of mine, the link www.mylanguageexchange.com where a person can find a penpal to practice any language anywhere at any time. Such is the global nature of our world now. Information is here at our disposal with the touch of a fingertip, but all this information is useless if we don’t actively make it a part of our daily routine.
All the sources in the world are no substitute for using a language in real-life scenarios every day. Those are the situations that, I have found, solidify language meaning into my long-term memory. Lately, I have been living and learning this truth the hard way: this past winter I made a transition out of the medical practice where I worked for the last seven years. When my position there ended, my real-life teachers, my Spanish-speaking patients, were suddenly not in my life on a daily basis anymore.
I no longer found myself every day asking someone, “¿Qué le pasa Ud.? “ or “¿ Por qué Ud. está en la clínica hoy? I stopped hearing regularly their explanations in Spanish, about how their child accidently scratched his eye, or how their vision was fine a week ago but now is terribly blurry and “empañada”. The more I heard what they had to say and listened to their life stories, the more real all the Spanish vocabulary and sentence structure and grammar became. I was able to move away from the sentence-by-sentence translation I was doing every day in my head and instead was able to just listen and respond. My teacher, the patient, and my school, the clinic, made Spanish come alive for me.
Winter is a dead season, especially so in the ophthalmology job market. I knew it would be some time before I would find my way into a new practice. Eight months have passed since I have sat down face to face at the slit lamp. I feel like the tin man left too long in the rain. My hinges are rusty, as is my Spanish, frozen in place since December. Now, a new opportunity has opened for me which I will embark on in a few short weeks. I will be treating a fairly large-size Latino patient population many of whom are only Spanish-speaking. I wonder if my Spanish, stagnant for so long and not given the opportunity to move forward, has actually regressed? I wonder how quickly I can feel comfortable again. I wonder when Spanish will become more second-nature and less a far second to my primary language, English. Only time will tell.
These sentiments remind me of a conversation I had with a patient years ago in practice.
Patient: Vine aquí por un examen de los ojos porque mi amiga, la Sra.—, ella es un paciente aquí, me dijo que ella tenía una experiencia buena con Usted. Ella me dice, “aj, vas a gustarle a ella”, y ahora veo lo que ella dice.
Doctor: Gracias. ¿Y por qué es eso?
P: Bueno, ella me dijo que Ud. habla español. Eso es muy importante para mí. Me gusta la habilidad a hablar con mi medico en mi idioma, a saber que ella me comprende completamente. Es muy importante a mí. Yo sé un poco íngles, pero no bastante para expresarme completo—todos mis problemas de salud—en íngles.
D: Está bien. Yo sé que mi español no es perfecto…no soy hablante nativa…
P: No importa. Me entiende y puedo comunicar con Usted. Eso es lo que es importante. Me contenta que Usted está aquí.
With all of my fears about expressing myself appropriately in Spanish, how I sound, the words I use, the way in which I speak, I realize it is worth risking mistakes in grammar or “sounding foolish” if the end result of my attempts sets my patient at ease. That’s what the doctor-patient relationship is all about-- making that special connection, earning trust and communicating. Afterall, treating the disease can only start first with treating the person.
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| Courtesy: D. Hromin |
