Quite Frenchy

Above: A typical morning out on the streets waiting for my bus to Roseau (Taken: Aug 2007)

YEARS OF HIGH SCHOOL SPANISH...

THREE HOURS OF COMMUNICATING

IN THE YEAR 1996, I remember sitting in a room with a bunch of my sixth grade peers taking some type of language aptitude exam. Being in Spanish class and getting a head start on the four years in high school was absolutely the chic thing to do. We sat there and all we did was listen to some unknown (and rather obsolete) foreign language come off of the record player, and figure out if we could understand it. OH YEAH, WE WERE KINDA FIBBING WHEN WE MARKED A BUBBLE SAYING WE KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON...

FROM THE YEARS 1997-2003, I spent 6 years learning Spanish in middle and high school, learning everything from nouns to verbs to conjunctive forms to attempting to learning how to swear (which apparently is hard to do without a student from a truly Hispanic background in your class to whisper it to you behind the teacher's back, as I learned years later).

And then afterwards... I thought it was all downhill... I thought I would never use Spanish practically again!

That is, UNTIL THE YEAR 2009. Week 7 in Semester 5 brings along the OBGYN (babies & female reproductive) rotations for two weeks. Today, we interviewed a patient who had trouble speaking and understanding English & spoke French creole... We knew we had a challenge on our hands. Fortunately, I was on rotations with a pair of Dominicans, and they really pulled out their trump card. Turns out that they're bilingual. However, there's a bug in all of that... I don't speak French Creole (which actually is quite a common finding in Dominica with its French origins), so I found myself always tapping one of them on the shoulder or shouting across the bed to another one of them to ask...

"Can you translate that response back to me again?"

After about 20 minutes of asking that with literally every other question (sometimes a bit of English would actually paid off), I had our patient laughing on her bed. She looked me right in the eye and then told me:

I speaks Spanish...

Now, why would she finally come up with that idea? Is it my hispanic-derived good looks? And my brain went into double-overdrive... I had to start yanking out Spanish from my left and right. Although my spanish was broken at times (putting together a bit of English with a slice of Creole which I learned from the last hour would crack in), I sometimes was able to help get out questions to the patient and our history taking was underway. I would never think I'd be pulling out words like dolor, cabeza, and even conjugate a word into the command form ever again. But I was doing it as it turned out the skills were still there... OKAY, SOME OF THEM. :P

Walking out of that room three hours later (a normal work-up of history and examination of a patient usually undertakes 1 hour), we were tired, but we learned a lot (another one of my colleagues wasn't exactly hot with her creole, but she did a great job as she realized). Not to mention, we all had a good time... our patient was an absolute fan of our looks of flabbergasted-ness (not a word, but you get the point :P). You know, sometimes those semesters or years in foreign language may actually play a key in skill in the future. Also knowing how to handle issues like that with your team can make a big difference in helping out patients who come to your office feel more like they're getting taken care of appropriately.

If I have an opportunity to go out and refresh my Spanish, you know what: I'm going to go do it. No voy a hacer más combinaciónes de "Spanglish." No más.