When I opted to move back to Dallas and take my current job, I started Spanish lessons again and forced myself to watch Netflix movies dubbed into Spanish. I wasn’t sure where I’d end up after residency. The demographics of Washington state are like another country when compared to Texas Vietnamese and Tigrinya would have been more useful. A younger woman who always has a book with her and is partial to Gabriel García Márquez.Īs a native Texan and a Spanish minor at UT Austin, my command of the language used to be decent, but I let it fall by the wayside when I moved to Seattle for residency and found I didn’t need it. An energetic man who photographs weddings on the weekends and has advised me on different types of drones (don’t tell him, but I’m not interested in buying one). There’s a matriarch who has bad knees but likes to take the stairs anyway her daughter is a doctor in another city. I’ve gotten to know the translator staff. I see all my Spanish-speaking patients in a row, walking from room to room, with the friendlier interpreters in step beside me, carrying on a conversation. Normally, I can place an order for a Spanish interpreter, and one shows up, dressed in a uniform of black slacks and royal purple polo shirt (Parkland’s signature color), within the hour. (I’ve changed some minor patient details to protect identities, but this is an absolute fact.) Twenty-two out of 25, or 88 percent, is so far of an outlier as to be a complete anomaly. Certainly it has never been more than half. Parkland is a county hospital on a typical day, perhaps a quarter of my patients are Spanish-speaking only. Moreover, out of the roughly 25 patients I cared for that week, only three spoke English. I didn’t get a real sense of the differences in this new group of patients until I got to the slog of “doing COVID” for days in a row, day in and day out.Īlmost immediately I was struck by how overwhelmingly Hispanic the patient makeup was.

I would come in for a few hours, admit a handful of patients with coronavirus, check on the sicker existing ones, then return to my normal job of caring for patients with problems I’m used to dealing with: heart failure, kidney injury, cellulitis. Prior to my one-week stint, my exposure to COVID patients had been limited to a smattering of night shifts. While I’d offered my services, I’d been more hesitant in my response to the unknown. Many of my fellow hospitalists, those who had been the first brave souls to volunteer, had already spent weeks doing so. I spent the third week of July in my job as an internal medicine physician at Parkland Memorial Hospital attending only to patients with COVID-19.

Hakha chin to english google translate