But yesterday was one of the shifts that just starts out wrong. I only had four patients on my sheet, one of whom never even showed up, but I didn't stop moving once in eight hours. It was the kind of day where everyone needed something extra. I went to give antibiotics to one patient, only to find that her IV didn't work and she would need a new one before her medication could be given. Another patient needed a catheter. My new admission needed to be settled. And the six or seven others in the ward who weren't mine all needed water or tissues or something.
Now, all this would have been well within my comfort zone, if only my patients had spoken English. But they didn't. Unless I spoke to my one lady in my thickest Liberian English, all I got from her was the slight eyebrow raise / barely-perceptible head nod which means I have no idea what you're saying, but I'm agreeing anyway. (Or, sometimes, I think everything you're telling me is absolutely true. It's kind of a toss-up.) My next patient was a child, and children don't tend to do well with things like getting jabbed with needles unless you lay a fairly thick foundation of stickers and silly faces and drawn-out conversations about football. This all takes time, and plenty of words. (The reward, however, is having the child hold perfectly still, intent on being a member of The Best IV Starting Team Ever, getting that IV on the first try and having said child's mother grin and shout GOAL!.)
The final straw was Alimou, my French-speaking source of worry from the weekend. He's much better now, 'awake, alert and oriented to person, place and time,' as we nurses delight in saying, but he's just unable to communicate. I can't imagine what it must be like for him right now. He's got a trach to breathe through, which means that he can't talk even if he wants to. So he's trapped, mute, in a strange, white world of people like myself who think that talking loudly or extra-slowly will somehow make him understand that I'm going to give him his dinner through his feeding tube now, thankyouverymuch. We give him a clipboard and a pen, and he scrawls things in Guinea French, his spelling so atrocious that even the usual French speakers aren't getting it. And then we all get frustrated, and he throws up his hands and closes his eyes and I move on to my next task. It went on like this for the first half of my shift. At one point, I was speaking to a Liberian translator who would speak Kpelle to the guy in the next bed who would turn and speak in Guinea French to Alimou. Alimou would put forth a complicated series of hand gestures which would be passed back through the neighbor and the translator to myself. (Is your head spinning yet?) This all took much more time than I had, and I was starting to get annoyed. So I went to dinner, because food fixes everything.
When I came back, Alimou had a visitor, a member of the team who had found him in Guinea and scheduled his surgery. They had the clipboard out and hands were flying as they tried to make themselves understood. So I did what seemed, somehow, totally natural. I grabbed Alimou's hand and said to him Qu'est-ce que tu veux dire? And the guy in the next bed told me, in French, what he thought Alimou was trying to say. And I translated that back into English for the visitor.
The only problem with all this is that I don't really speak French. Granted, I took a year of it back in grade twelve, but up until now the only thing I could say is Je veux du jambon. I won't go hungry in a French-speaking country, but it hasn't been a terribly helpful phrase in the grand scheme of things. Yesterday, everything I had forgotten seemed to elbow its way past the years of random junk piled into my brain, right to the very front where I was able to pull it out with startling ease. We weren't having in-depth conversations about the meaning of life or the social implications of his transformative surgery, but I was able to tell him when it was time to eat and ask him if he was cold and joke with the guy in the next bed about how maybe I'm too young to be doing this job. In French. A language I don't really speak.
I was reading through Psalm 119 the other day. Verse after verse about the truth and beauty and rightness of God's commands. And then, buried there towards the end, these words.
Your promises have been thoroughly tested, and your servant loves them.And then I can't help but run through some of those promises in my mind. I will never leave you. I won't give you more than you can handle. You will never be alone. When times are hard, I will share that burden. I love you more than life itself. These past months have already seen me thoroughly testing these words. I can't see that changing any time soon, and that's a sweet thought, because I love those promises.
