notageek

…even when they express unsavory viewpoints, such as an abject aversion to learning any Spanish whatsoever despite planning to practice in an area with a high concentration of Spanish-speaking workers.

It is also not polite to give them a verbal thrashing, but at least it’s legally permissible.

I speak fumbling Spanish, the lightest sprinklings of German and Japanese, and a few mere words of my ancestral hick-tastic Cantonese dialect. It is bloody hard to learn another language, and I am young and relatively well-educated. The better one knows one’s own language, the easier it is to learn another; plenty of people in any country have incorrect grammar and bad pronunciation in their native language. Newspapers are written at a junior-high reading level, at least in the US, because we have difficulty educating our own native-English-speaking children well enough.

My grandparents are immigrants and learned English post-arrival; they were poor and foreign. They ran a laundry (not a laundromat; a laundry. They washed and ironed shit.) and washed dishes; a similar niche to many of the Latin American families who are immigrating today. My grandparents learned English, but it took a long time—their mean time here is about 75 years—and they still don’t speak or read much above an elementary-school level. It is unrealistic to expect more, especially when the press of poverty—a prime reason for emigrating, remember—precludes the time or funding for formal ESL education.

When I was in Spanish-speaking countries I craved English. The cognitive expenditure involved in both navigating an unfamiliar infrastructure and having most of one’s vital communications abruptly swapped over to less-familiar language is exhausting. I would sit down with volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica just for the relief of reading something I was sure to understand. And I knew some Spanish already.

This is part of why it’s pointless to rail against immigrants creating their own native-language communities. It’s a logical response to both larger-community hostility and longing for the familiarity of that which you left behind. Moreover, just because someone can make it through the day at work or in a classroom doesn’t mean they’re going to understand all the medical jargon we throw at them in English; most of the vocabularies don’t overlap.

My mom and her sibling group speak perfectly good English. They’re not conversant with more esoteric idioms (Shooting the breeze? Shooting the moon?), but they’re fluent and speak English at home; none of them spoke a word of English until they started school. We grandkids are all native English speakers.

As healthcare workers our role is not to force linguistic conversion through crappy service. Our raison d’etre is the provision of quality care to our patients, and for pharmacists that means we need to ensure the same level of patient education and understanding that we could for our English-speaking patients.

Even if it sucks for us.

My family is fairly odd, so it’s rare that a patient reminds me of a relative–which is probably a good thing.

Sometimes it’s merely funny; I counsel some vain and subtly-muscled Asian guy on which multivitamin is likely to have more benefit for his prostate, or a middle-aged beardy guy on how to deal with a particularly vicious razor bump.

Sometimes it’s kind of cute; the middle-aged Asian/Caucasian couple asking me about a very certain sort of tape. Don’t think I can’t hear you comparing me to your kids in your heads, middle-aged Asian/Caucasian couples–and don’t think I’m not wondering, you other crossbreeds.

Occasionally it’s both, like the very intense middle-aged lady insisting that the Nasalcrom we carry is “too beeg”; I suspect she was from the same province we are. Or the very intense older lady who demanded to know if her partner’s prescriptions had any contraindications.

“My husband, he has trouble eating.” Does his mouth hurt? Does he have reflux, nausea, indigestion, constipation? No, no and no. Does he eat too much? Is it only after certain foods? No, no, he just doesn’t feel good after he eats. How does he feel? He just feels no good.

These are symptom descriptors that make us white-coats tear our hair out.

“I make him food special, he take two bites and no want eat. He had prostate cancer, all done chemo, still no want eat.”

I put down the box of meclizine and explained that we had no nonprescription items that could help her husband’s eating problems, that it was very important to tell the doctor about this at her husband’s appointment tomorrow, and how sorry I was that I couldn’t help her husband find something. She bowed and thanked me profusely.

I slunk back to the pharmacy and ducked under the counter to snivel a little. I had failed my mom, my grandmother, my aunties–an army of short fierce women who prickle with sarcasm but would pull down the sky if it would somehow help someone they love. Even if they would never admit to that love in public.

Have you wished YOUR mom a happy National Nursing Week yet?*

My mom brought me up to recognize the hard and sometimes crappy work that goes into both jobs, and I think I love and respect her far more for that than if I held her in some rosy halo of maternal mysticism. She’s my ma, and she’s tougher than her Danskos and sharper than the needles she spends all day sticking into people’s arms.

Hipy Papy, Ma. And Hipy Papy to all the moms and all the nurses whose dedication and hard work gets too often swept under a rug of hearts-and-flowers sentimentality.

There’s gotta be some way I can needle her about this, though. Maybe a little nursey-bear, or a flowery name-badge holder, or an email forward about *~*~NURSES~*~* and *~*~*~MOTHERS*~*~*~* <3<3<3<3

*May not apply to yo mama.