Perdida en traducción

A month ago I received an email from a youth development volunteer living close by asking if I’d like to help translate for a medical brigade that was coming to her town soon. Seeing as how I’d been so bored lately due to lack of work that I’d actually started cooking, I jumped at the chance. A whole week of work! I found out that there would be several other volunteers translating as well and that we would all gather at Connie’s house the night before the brigade to eat Indian food. Due to anticipation and boredom I made low-fat fudge and sugar cookies (I honestly have been learning to cook, my lasagna rocks!) which never made it to Connie’s because a couple of friends came to visit me the night before I was to leave and ate every last piece.

Ok, brigade time. By the way, the Indian food was great but I wasn’t aware I was going to have to pay for it. I think that if you “invite” people over for dinner then payment should not be rendered. If you surrender over money when you weren’t expecting to you weren’t invited, you were lied to! Cheap PCVs… Granted, there were about 20 people eating dinner, but still, a little warning perhaps! I agreed to wash dishes BEFORE I knew I would be paying for my plate…stupid, stupid…

The medical brigade, or more appropriately, mission, was a Presbyterian team of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and dentists. Most were from Arkansas but Texas, Louisiana, and North Carolina were also represented. I even met several who’ve heard of the Rio Grande Valley! I’m still shocked whenever I meet someone who knows that the Valley exists. There were about twenty of them and four of us. Two other peace corps volunteers (PCVs) and one bilingual teacher. As soon as we entered the Mennonite church, where we’d all gather for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the entire week, everyone was very excited to have us on board. One of the doctors in charge, Doctor John, immediately let the rest of the group know who we were and that we’d be the most important people there, bridging the communication gap between patient and healer. Great, no pressure! Out of their group, only two were bilingual; both of Mexican ancestry, and both from Texas. Tommy, a dentist, and Gabe, a doctor with some medical specialty I can’t remember.

As luck would have it, I ended up translating for Jeff Marrotte, an urologist, a doctor which specializes in all things urinary. At times I would switch off between him and his brother Justin, a dermatologist, the study of all freakish skin issues. I never imagined that in my life I would have to ask grown men to please pull your pants down, bend over slightly, rest your elbows on the table, and spread your legs so the doctor can stick his finger in your anus in order to feel your prostate. And, don’t worry; I’ll hold this sheet up for privacy so that the ten other people in this classroom can’t see. A couple of times I had to coax them into this procedure by telling them that God sent these foreign doctors here in order to help, therefore having a rectal exam performed was by no means immoral. The majority of Hondurans live in poverty so they’re not accustomed to routine medical check ups. They seek medical attention whenever they’re in grave physical pain, or whenever free foreign medical brigades are in town. Each day the medical team saw about 250 patients and the most common complaints were “gastritis, bone pain, and headaches”. Towards the end of the week, after so many repetitive symptoms, both Dr. Jeff and Dr. Justin felt comfortable with me prognosing the patients. For example, bone pain, dolor en los huesos, is just a simple way to explain arthritis.
Yes, of course you have bone pain in your hands and wrists, Dona Josefina. You’ve been hand washing pounds of clothes every day of your life since you were ten. Not to mention the thousands of tortillas you’ve banged out over time. Oh, you’re back hurts Don Armando… It could be due to the fact that you’ve spent half of your life bent over with a hoe preparing the earth for cultivation. Don’t worry folks; you don’t have a rare disease or fatal illness. What you suffer from is nonstop hard labor with no rest in between. What’s that Dr. Jeff? You want me to tell Dona Josefina to rest her hands for a couple of weeks? But, you see Jeff, if she does that then the clothes doesn’t get washed and the food isn’t prepared and her family suffers. She has no choice. What can we do? Other than start a revolution, let’s just give them something for the pain and move on.

Due to the fact that I was translating for an urologist I was able to see some interesting patients. One mother brought in her eight year old son because she wasn’t sure if he had his right testicle or not. She’d heard conflicting views from a couple of Honduran doctors so she figured that the All Mighty Gringo doctors would have the right answer. Turns out they did! What confused the other doctors is that it appeared her son had a right testicle because instead he had a hernia where the testes should have been. The testes itself was in his body but by his belly button for it hadn’t fully descended. Apparently, when males are in the womb, their testicles start to develop close to the kidneys, prostate, and bladder and eventually they drop down to hang out with the penis. This child’s right one didn’t quite make it. I then had the fun task of explaining all this to his mother as well as giving her the option to have the badass Dr. Jeff perform free testicular surgery on her son or have him grow up without a right testicle, which isn’t totally abnormal, with minimal health risks except that he might develop testicular cancer in the un-ascended testicle and not be able to detect it in time. It was a stressful conversation because, A- I had never spoken these words in Spanish before (although I did an excellent job), B – His mom and never heard this diagnosis before and therefore had many concerns, and, C – Money was an issue and although Dr. Jeff would perform his part of the surgery for free the anesthesiologist would still have to be paid. Ultimately, his mom opted for the surgery but the day that Dr. Jeff and I were to scrub in at the local hospital’s operating room the little boy’s pediatrician called off the surgery saying that he had a cold and could not be operated on at the present moment. I was pissed! I had hyped myself up, studied surgical words in Spanish, and eaten a hearty breakfast in order to not pass out, for nothing! Later we found out that the O.R had run out of anesthesia and had to shut down for the rest of the day, so it turns out that not doing the surgery was a blessing in disguise.

Translating for the brigade put me in situations I’d never fathomed I’d be in before: Explaining to an antiquated campesino lacking lucidity that he has prostate cancer, which didn’t seem to concern him because the illness isn’t something he could grasp; he would simply nod with a blankness in his eyes and then go on explaining about his headaches and bone pain. A woman came in with a rash around her anus and I was given the privilege of asking her permission to take a picture of if, “estas ayudando al futuro de ciencia” and of holding the flashlight up to it so that Dr. Justin, the dermatologist, could get the appropriate lighting. Then there was the mother of nine who complained of a sensation that something inside of her was coming out, especially during urination and sex, and when I asked if she could lie down to have the doctor exam her external reproductive organs became extremely embarrassed because she hadn’t bathed that day and refused to have the exam done. I had to cajole her into returning the next day after bathing. She did and was fine. We had a similar case earlier in the week and the diagnosis was a prolapsed uterus; meaning that after 10 births, almost exclusively at home without anesthesia or a medical team, her uterus had basically stretched out and deflated so many times that it was now hanging out of her vagina. Apparently it’s a common issue, especially in the developing world, and all she needed was a little plastic cube that she can place inside herself to keep the uterus in abeyance. Incidentally, I now want to go through the miracle of birth even less than I did before. Sorry dear parents, but your future grandchild will not have any sanguinary relation to me. In the Nature vs. Nurture fight being played out in the ring that is my mind, nurture is one up on nature.

My one week stint in the medical field really impressed me and I’ve been thinking about getting a graduate degree in public health whenever I make it back to The States. Several of the doctors told me they’d write sparkling references for me if I need them so at least I’ve got that part covered (by “that part” I mean ass kissing); now I just have to think about that bothersome GRE…