“Eli can you log out of your account so I can document on bed 8?”
“Sorry, what?”
I’m not exagerrating when I say that every 5th sentence I use at work is “Sorry, what?”
Firstly, it throws me off that half of the staff refer to me as “Eli”. I’m not sure how it started but I’m also not sure how to stop it. I don’t mind, but it takes me longer to register when people are speaking to me. Inevitably the first few phrases I hear on the unit tend to be ones I need repeating, as it takes about 5 minutes for my brain to do it’s 180 degree turn into German-mode and buckle up for the next 8 hours of the rough ride through dialect, slang and generally rapid fire German.
I’m nearly halfway through my third week of my new job on the cardiovascular ICU, and I go daily through a range of emotions from bored, to scared, to curious, as a typical shift bombards me with hundreds of new German words, new medical terms, new faces, diagnoses, and new ways of doing absolutely everything.
Not even my foundational basic first year nursing skills are a safe place to fall on in this new environment. The most basic comforts I seek in familiarity through equipment like IV catheters, foley bags and BEDDING are absent. Why do German hospital bedsheets need to be different?? It’s not enough that I look for a stupidly long time at something like an IV tube, but it does a whole new level of damage to my psyche to find myself struggling with an oddly-sewn bedsheet that I’m not familiar with. The poor patients must be terrified seeing me, their primary nurse, puzzling over linens.
During an emergency yesterday with my patient, the doc, who was gowned up in a sterile gown and gloves, asked me to make the bed “hoch fahren”. In my understanding of the word “Fahren”, I think movement: forward movement, like driving, so I understood that to mean move the bed forward a little. But when I started pushing the bed into him, I quickly realised he meant UP. Obviously, don’t push the bed INTO the doc, Lizzy: RAISE IT UP. Little things like that happen to me constantly, all day long. Afterwards I can think back on them and realise that I absolutely do understand the meaning of what people have said or asked, but in the moment, the actual meaning just didn’t come to me.
I’ve gotten into a habit of apologising for my language to all of the patients at the first sign of a German mistake. With the differences between polite and inpolite pronouns, I frequently find that I accidentally use the informal when I should be using the formal version. The comatose patients provide a small amount of relief, since I don’t need to focus as hard on communicating with them.
The unit is so good to me, though. I’ve been surprised and so incredibly grateful at the amount of patience that is shown to me by absolutely everyone, including the docs who are at risk of me running them over with beds. When I think of the scenario I could be in, and if the staff had just a little less tolerance for my newness and foreignness, I’m filled with relief that they’re so kind to me. I’ve found they’ve welcomed me into their circle, showing interest in my background, and sharing inside jokes with me.
It’s hard sometimes for me to focus on the challenging medical terms and equipment, when my mind is so occupied with just following along in German, but I’m finding that, as exhausting as it is, I am learning both. Patience is a theme of great importance to me on a minute-by-minute basis. Patience with myself, mostly. It’s very easy to slip into a self-abasing attitude, telling myself I’m not where I should be and I shouldn’t have tried this until I had at least a full year of solid German language training. But I’m a firm believer that God opened all of these doors to me very intentionally and allowed me to be here, as I am right now, complete with my faultering German. It’s hard to trust God also to give my colleagues the patience they need too, to work with me and support me through this orientation time.
I have a subtle plan for maintaining good rapport with the staff through something that requires zero language skills and is 100% in my comfort zone, and that is baking. I brought chocolate chip cookies (soft, gooey North American ones, which somehow the Germans have not figured out the secret to but all crave), and I plan to continue to periodically bribe my colleagues with such goodies for as long as I continue to flounder through my German.
Along the Way 