Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Me, Myself, and I

The happy-go-lucky Nokia tone started ringing in my pocket, and I began to wish that the evening December 12, 2010, had never existed. I hadn’t had a night this busy in a long time, and although clichés are worn out excuses for tired minds, I’m the first to admit that it never rains but it pours. I didn’t want to be here. I really, really didn’t want to be here in the middle of all this. It was an interpreting nightmare, with all my least favorite appointments playing out in the space of three hours. It started in the pregnancy diabetes clinic, running late as usual, with a drawn-out diet teaching to a very tired, very pregnant, and very diabetic mom. She didn’t want to be here either, and I can’t blame her since we were the only ones left in the place. I was starting to think she was only catching every fifth word I interpreted when the educator caught on and let her go home. Then the Emergency Department exploded in all ways but actual physical combustion, and I found myself next to another very pregnant and very sad mother whose husband’s cheating had thrust her into tears and depression. I really hate those; it’s hard enough to watch my patients’ physical struggles. It’s almost more than I can bear sometimes to watch their emotional, real-world, kicked-around-and-let-down moments. We were just about to take Social Work in when the Nokia started singing again and “This is Labor and Delivery and they’re requesting you in Operating Room 2, and STAT.” That was the quickest G to 3 I’ve done since I started at this hospital, and I walked into a weakly crying baby, a drugged up and passed out mom, and a dad waiting in tears in a dimly lit labor room, not knowing what was really going on or why his wife was suddenly whisked away with 20 masked people. My one happy moment was walking in with the nurse’s message that mom is alright. 29 week old baby girl is doing very well, and everything’s going to be OK. It was their first baby. Mom came out the anesthesia crying – I wondered as I watched her wake up if the teardrops hugging her eyelid were the tears she’d gone to sleep with, trapped under the plastic eye covers from her surgery. I stood there with Dad as we watched her wake, fielding his questions, expressing his concerns, living the spoken life of a father who, as far as he knew, almost lost his two girls. He was too close to being right – baby girl’s heart rate had dropped dangerously low for too long, and another few minutes would have brought the chaplain and grievance counselor instead of the pediatrician and the nurse.

Interpreting is a strange profession bordering on schizophrenia. I was a swollen, frustrated mother who couldn’t get my diabetes or my growing belly under control; I was a shattered, discarded wife picking up the pieces of what used to be along with my teardrops; I was a scared, 20 year old girl who went to sleep with a tummy and woke up without my baby and wondering if she even survived. And then I stepped into my office, and I was ME. I looked back and saw what I had done, saw the little piece of Awful I’d chopped off the traumatic by making my patients heard, the doctors understood, and some of the barriers eased. I breathed a prayer for that, and suddenly, I was very glad to be here, in December 12, 2010.

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