Disunderstanding

She asks me, "why are all the doctors foreigners now?" as if it were a trade secret.

"I can't understand what they're saying to me. My vital health information and I can't make out what they're saying. Bad enough the medical jargon, but the accent on top of that! It's awful."

"Nothing against them, of course. They earned their medical degree, I'm sure they're good doctors. But can't I have one that speaks proper English? I mean, this is my health we're talking about here."

Other family members nod in agreement. Perfectly reasonable. Been there. Sorry to say. Sad state of affairs. Too bad, really. What can you do?


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The hospital had a main hallway where you saw everyone, eventually, in passing. I was walking up behind a woman in a motorized wheelchair who I had seen many times before but never spoken to; like me she worked in one of the many connected buildings. She was slowing her chair and I got to about ten feet behind her when she spoke to someone coming up in the other direction.

Her speech was impaired, but not so much that I couldn't hear what she said to the woman right in front of her:

"Excuse me, could you open the door for me?"

You see, most of the doors had an automatic button, but for some stupid reason this particular door did not, and it would clearly be a production to maneuver through it. It opened inward, with a crankshaft handle, and was not wide.

This other woman, she cast her eyes down on the woman in the wheelchair only momentarily. She did a complicated shrug and a semicircular dodging manuever, and what she said in response was a hasty cross between "what?" and "huh?" while she kept walking past and away.

But the passing woman met MY eyes as she hurried away, because I was there to see her. And to me, not to the woman in the wheelchair, she looked sorry, she looked very sorry indeed, because she just couldn't understand what was just said to her, and what can you do?

My coworker turned her chair just enough to watch the hurrying woman go past without ever stopping, and called after her sarcastically, "thanks a lot!"

Which was also perfectly understandable.

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One more story: I was working with a patient, a sixty-something woman from old-school Southie, the one who called David Ortiz "my boy Davy" when the Red Sox game was starting. She had a grandmotherly, well-meaning way about her. Her nurse on this particular day was a Guatemalan woman I'll call Flo.

Having lived in the USA for many years, Flo spoke perfect English, grammatical and fluid, with a lovely lively accent. She was nearly always upbeat and friendly, but when I stopped in to see this patient Flo looked frustrated.

"What is she saying?" Southie Grandma asks me when I come in. Flo had been explaining the doctor's instructions. Which I wouldn't have known anything about, incidentally. Flo started again, in perfectly comprehensible English, and the patient turns to me and says, "I can't understand what she's saying."

She does this not once or twice, but many times.

But only when I was there. When it was just Flo in the room with her, she smiled in pleasant incomprehension and waited for someone else to come in.