You need to be able to communicate to staff in hospitals in any country you are visiting.
In 1984 I was at a turning point in my career. I had been a freelance travel writer for a long time and for the first time I was sent by Brides magazine on a press trip to report. Unfortunately, the last night people played the guitar all night so I got little sleep and woke up groggy. That didn't matter. All I had to do was get on the coach and catch the plane home where my husband would meet me at the airport.
The coach taking us to the airport broke down. It looked like we might miss our plane. We were told that another coach was coming. leave everything behind. and cross the road to the hotel. I left my camera on the bus, and crossed the road, hurrying after the group, thinking, I should not have left my camera with my vital pictures for the magazine on the bus.
In England, the traffic drives on the other side of the road.
I woke up in hospital unable to move. My camera was covered in blood. My leather sandal was torn in half. I had been knocked down by a car and had multiple injuries including a lump on my leg, a broken collar bone, and blood coming out of ear from a brain injury.
Drugs
I was really happy. I was on morphine.
When the morphine wore off I was in agony. I was screaming. People rushed in and held me down and gave me an injection. When the drug wore off, I realised that my drug induced high was phony. I as alone in a foreign hospital where I could not speak the language.
I decided that if I ever recovered my health, I would never take drugs.
If your relative in hospital is seriously ill, and lying still, but happy to see you, smiling and content, it may be because the hospital is efficiently controlling their pain with morphine.
You might want to kid them that they are getting better and coming home. Don't kid yourself that everything is ok without check whether the hospital knows something you don't know about the patient's condition and the drugs they are taking. Say or do anything you need. Get a will, a signature, anything you need, just in case, door keys to the house, just in case.
Learn languages. Keep translation devices with you. Why languages?
Even if you think you are fluent, almost bilingual, things can go wrong with technical misunderstanding. In hospital in Corsica, I asked for a radio. I said, un radio. They took me for a radio. A radio in their language meant an X-ray.
The modern fashion is for doctors to tell the truth so that patients can get their affairs in order.
The old-fashioned way was never to tell anybody they were dying.
Why. Because they might lose their will to live. This happened to my father. I was very cross.
Morals to this story:
1 Check what drugs hospital patients are taking.
2 Don't tell somebody they are dying. Ask them to set their affairs in order so you can look after things when they are ill. Cancel mail orders and subscriptions. Get passwords. Insurance policies.
3 Learn languages.
4 Remember that un radio in Corsica means not a radio but an x-ray.
In 1984 I was at a turning point in my career. I had been a freelance travel writer for a long time and for the first time I was sent by Brides magazine on a press trip to report. Unfortunately, the last night people played the guitar all night so I got little sleep and woke up groggy. That didn't matter. All I had to do was get on the coach and catch the plane home where my husband would meet me at the airport.
The coach taking us to the airport broke down. It looked like we might miss our plane. We were told that another coach was coming. leave everything behind. and cross the road to the hotel. I left my camera on the bus, and crossed the road, hurrying after the group, thinking, I should not have left my camera with my vital pictures for the magazine on the bus.
In England, the traffic drives on the other side of the road.
I woke up in hospital unable to move. My camera was covered in blood. My leather sandal was torn in half. I had been knocked down by a car and had multiple injuries including a lump on my leg, a broken collar bone, and blood coming out of ear from a brain injury.
Drugs
I was really happy. I was on morphine.
When the morphine wore off I was in agony. I was screaming. People rushed in and held me down and gave me an injection. When the drug wore off, I realised that my drug induced high was phony. I as alone in a foreign hospital where I could not speak the language.
I decided that if I ever recovered my health, I would never take drugs.If your relative in hospital is seriously ill, and lying still, but happy to see you, smiling and content, it may be because the hospital is efficiently controlling their pain with morphine.
You might want to kid them that they are getting better and coming home. Don't kid yourself that everything is ok without check whether the hospital knows something you don't know about the patient's condition and the drugs they are taking. Say or do anything you need. Get a will, a signature, anything you need, just in case, door keys to the house, just in case.
Learn languages. Keep translation devices with you. Why languages?
Even if you think you are fluent, almost bilingual, things can go wrong with technical misunderstanding. In hospital in Corsica, I asked for a radio. I said, un radio. They took me for a radio. A radio in their language meant an X-ray.
The modern fashion is for doctors to tell the truth so that patients can get their affairs in order.
The old-fashioned way was never to tell anybody they were dying.
Why. Because they might lose their will to live. This happened to my father. I was very cross.
Morals to this story:
1 Check what drugs hospital patients are taking.
2 Don't tell somebody they are dying. Ask them to set their affairs in order so you can look after things when they are ill. Cancel mail orders and subscriptions. Get passwords. Insurance policies.
3 Learn languages.
4 Remember that un radio in Corsica means not a radio but an x-ray.
- About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a trave writer and phtographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.
Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a langauge evaluator or grammarian. We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and other language clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.
I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other Wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
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