Spoken Word Poetry

In a book I am reading, a character starts spitting rhymes at an open mic night.
"I'd love to do that," I think,
but then I remember
that words come from feelings
and I'm still pretending
that I don't have any.

I'm fine.
Even though most of the time I'm
locked away in some corner of my mind,
the real me afraid that something is wrong,
something HAS to be wrong,
or I wouldn't feel this way.

But what that is, I'm not trying to find out.
Safer to stay on the lookout
for other ways to occupy my days.
So I stay busy.
But my body rebels, dispels
emotional energy through my cells
making muscles I couldn't isolate if I tried
jump and twitch,
and the fears I tried to hide
come oozing out my skin.
I want to cry.
But when I do I feel terrible.
My neck aches.
Since when do necks ache
when it's your heart that feels fit to break?

But I'm still pretending that I'm fine.
My life, is great.
Sure, my boyfriend's undocumented,
but what does that have to do with it?
I'm straight.

And no, it's not a lotta weight,
at least, I can't tell how much it is.
What part of this comes from lack of papers
and what's his.
'Cause when a body tells you you're not worth the dirt stuck to their shoes,
that shit sticks to you.
And then it shapes you.
And when it comes time to leave and cleave,
I'm sorry, I mean to move yo' ass and prove your love
that shit stops you, 'cause you still feel like an old, used piece of gum glued
to the heel of the government's shoe.
So what do I do? I know he's a good man, who loves me, and I love him, too.

Any maybe this isn't the problem at all.
Maybe the wall I put in place to hide my face from whatever it is I can't trace right now
is hiding something else entirely.
How would I know? I don't wanna look back there,
it's scary. Apparently, I'd rather let the fear become nameless,
and the dread become baseless,
and have all the things I can't control LITERALLY make my skin crawl.

I want to be better. I want to make meaning out of suffering,
clear away the cobwebs of pain and shame
from memories and the life in front of me
and become awake to reality.
To put names to my fears
To use my ears to tell my brain that I can't explain or prepare for everything.
That life hurts. But there's goodness in it too, a sweetness you miss if you
hide from the pain by rushing through.

I want to learn to be okay with not being the best at everything.
Not being the wisest in the room or
the first to solve a problem,
the one who doesn't need to be told.
Because I know that for me, not needing to be those things would mean
that I was being bold.
Letting go of needing control and still feeling safe would mean
- shit, I don't know, probably vulnerability.
Which I'm told is the best way to be awake to BOTH joy AND pain.

I want to let out tears, to let them quiet my fears
enough to be able to tell my soul that I'll be okay without control.
To let myself know that the truth is, I've never HAD control because none of us does.
But what I DO have - in abundance, even - is love.

heartstrings

When I tell people that I work in a children's hospital, they will often say, "oh, that must be easier than working in adults." Generally I'll answer back that actually, for me, it's harder. One of the reasons is that, when your patient is a child, you end up spending most of your time interpreting for their family, so you get up close and personal with the deep love of parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles for their children. That love is intensely strong, and intensely vulnerable, and it can wring you in ways an encounter with an adult patient may not. I was reminded of this recently when I met a young man who required a tracheotomy to breathe, though his mind was perfectly clear.

Some quick background information you may need for this story:

1. A tracheotomy is a hole that a surgeon can make in someone's throat to allow them to breathe without the air going through the person's nose or mouth. It's done if you can't breathe the usual way for some reason.
2. Having a trach generally means you can't talk because in order to speak you need to be able to let air flow over your vocal chords on it's way out of your body - which the air can't do after a tracheotomy because it gets out through the trach before it gets to the vocal chords. 
3. People who get a tracheotomy (trach for short, pronounced "trake") may have a lot of what we call "secretions" - i.e. mucous - but because of the trach, when they cough it up, it can't go all the way up to their throat, where they could swallow it like we all do (gross, I know, sorry) so it has to be manually suctioned out with a special device. So when you see someone with a trach there's often a lot of really gross bodily fluid noises, and fluids.

So I was with this patient and his family, interpreting for his speech therapist, who had brought him a new device to try. This device, though, would allow the boy to inhale through his trach, and exhale through his mouth, which meant he'd be able to speak out loud for the first time since he had the trach placed.

Before letting him try it out, the speech therapist explained to the family (through me in Spanish) and the patient (in English) that putting the device on would change how air was flowing, so it would probably feel uncomfortable at first. She said "it's normal not to be able to tolerate it for long at first, maybe not even a minute; but you can get used to it and work up to being able to leave it on and being able to talk for up to several hours."

So, having set the expectations, she let him try it. There was a lot of spluttering, and he couldn't keep it on for long, but he did manage to start forming one word: "ma-"

The next time he tried it, he managed the whole word: "ma..mi..."

He had so much trouble that time, that the speech therapist asked him to try just humming instead of speaking. He did. It was a pitiful, high-pitched whine, and you could tell from his face that it was intensely uncomfortable. More spluttering and spit, and she took it off.

The next time, she said, don't try to talk or hum - just let me count to 10, and we'll take it off. He did. It was clearly still excruciating.

"Do you want to try again?" she asked. He shook his head no. "Do you want to tell your mom anything before we stop?" He nodded his head yes. She put it on. This time, he held on and managed to say "Mami, te quiero!" before gasping and needing it to be taken off.

I sat in shock for a second, my throat tightening with emotion, before I realized only his mom and I knew what he'd said. "Mommy, I love you!" I repeated, in English, for the speech therapist, respiratory therapist, and the newly arrived psychologist, and was gratified to hear a collective "Aww!!"

When asked if he was willing to try one more time, he refused, and we ended the session there. But it was all I could do not to cry right in the middle of the interpretation. Here was a boy who had spent an unknown amount of time unable to speak, and, without hesitation, the second he got the chance, the first thing he wanted to do - without even stopping to learn how or get comfortable with the new way of using his body - was tell his mother that he loved her. I was awestruck.

It is such a privilege to walk with people in deep suffering, because you see beauty like this. It reminded me of the woman who, upon being told she was likely going to lose her grandchild, began to give thanks for the time she had been able to spend with that child, for the joy of having held that child in her arms the day before. Thanks.

And it is in part for this reason that working in the children's hospital is, for me, harder than working with adults: because you go to those raw places with people who love the people who are suffering. When you work with adults, you have more freedom NOT to put yourself in the shoes of someone who really cares about your patient, because they aren't always there, or, in the interpreter's case, because the patient does most of the talking. When you're working with kids, you don't, because they're right in front of you, doing and feeling and saying all the things loving families and friends do and feel and say. And if you're an interpreter... then whatever they say, you repeat, in English, for everyone else to hear. Their bond with the patient, expressed in their words, passes through you. And it can't not touch you on the way.

don't get bogged down

Today begins with pain. Physical and emotional. Physical because I hurt my shoulder last night, emotional because I learned on arriving to work that yet another of the patients my coworkers and I have served over the course of months and years, has died.

There have been several deaths like that this year, and I was talking to an interpreter friend about how that is an aspect of the job she's not familiar with. Interpreting is a pretty diverse field,  you see, and even one hospital can differ greatly from another. I didn't realize, when I began my journey as an interpreter, that I would be a conduit, not just for people's words, but for their grief and pain; that, in joining a group of professions that work with hurting bodies, I would also find hurting people. It should have come as no surprise to me that when someone's body stops working the way that it should, the person feels unhappy, betrayed, aggrieved, etc. But foolishly, it didn't occur to me. In the same way, it didn't occur to me that when a loved one is ill, or needs medical testing, families feel fear, grief, anger, love, and more... and express those things from the smallest to the most heart-wrenching ways.

I have always been what others call "deep," which in reality just means that I go more easily than most to that conceptual level where ideas and our feelings about them turn out to be inescapably entangled. I can't stand a conversation that's intellectual for the sake of intellect, but when there's passion involved, I'm all in. So I have truly enjoyed, in a way, getting to be with people in the most intimate, emotional processes and decisions that humans go through in life. I count it a privilege. But I wish someone had warned me, because it's starting to become difficult to hold all these stories. My arms are too full, and the thought of holding one more makes me afraid of dropping them, tripping, and falling...

My counselor says this is normal for helping professions. She throws out words like "compassion fatigue" and "PTSD" as things that are common experiences. Me, I remember a very smart PR lady I once worked with who said, "it takes six positive experiences to balance out one negative experience." For her, the point was customer service. For me, it means I need to start very intentionally keeping a list of the good things I see. Flecks of light, joy, hope, peace. Because the bad weighs more than the good, those good things tend to fly away on the wind that disappears memories. But if I list them, maybe my day will look more like mica-flecked rock: dark in color, but sparkling when you turn it over in the light.

***
Obviously, there are more ways to practice self-care than making lists of the good things in a day. That has proved a useful tool for me in the past, so as these weeks have been extra difficult, I'm going to pick it up again. But exercise, vacations, and projects where I have control have also proved very helpful. One of the hardest things about interpreting, for me, is that I have so very little control over anything: where I interpret, for whom, for how long, in what type of situation, when I get a break; even to a certain extent whether or not I interpret for someone who, in my professional opinion, needs it or could benefit from it. So another thing that helps me is finding professional projects to work on where I do have control, which for me ends up being teaching and developing continuing education for interpreters.

If you are an interpreter too, I hope that this post helps you. What we do isn't just a workout for the mind, it's hard on the heart as well. I hope this post encourages you to find ways of keeping yourself in balance.

sometimes...

I sat in the hospital chapel, head in my hands, trying to pray but slipping into sleep instead. My phone rang. It was the dispatcher, who wanted me to rush right back to the side of the child I'd just left, in the outpatient clinic. He'd taken a turn for the worse, and the clinic had called rapid response.
My bowed head just earlier had been for him. Sometimes, you just know.

I rushed back toward the elevator. Would it be faster to take the elevator? I tried, but after 15 seconds, decided I'd better just rush up the stairs. Even though I've never said my own words to them, even though this family knows next to nothing about me, I've spent hours of months repeating their words, and have a deep affection for them. I thought of the child's mother, listening and watching without knowing or understanding, and took the stairs two at a time. Sometimes, someone else's emergency is yours, too.

Scattered

"I think," I said in what I hoped was a very measured tone, "that one of the hardest things about this job is how unpredictabe it is." My coworker agreed without skipping a beat. She had watched me return to the office twice in a row, only to be called right as I walked in, feet away from my desk, and asked to go out to another part of the hospital. In between the first and second, there'd been a third call, but that time I only made it to the stairwell. Which begs the question "Why were you even trying? Why not just stay put?"

The answer is that I was trying because you just never know. Often I'll wait after an encounter ends, hang around in a random hallway and see if I'll get another call. Sometimes I do, other times I don't. Sometimes I wait around for 20 minutes, afraid of looking lazy in comparison to all the busy nurses and techs and maintenance people walking past me. But I'm not lazing about - waiting is just part of my workflow. But you never know how long it's going to be. It's like waiting for the bus and not being sure what the traffic pattern is like at the moment. Or like checking facebook to see if you have any notifications. When, and where, and how intensely I have to work is not under my control. Period. One minute I might be making sure someone explains medication dosing so they can go home, the next moment I might be giving a worried mom an explanation for why her child is suddenly in the ICU. You just never know. And you might have 2 minutes between calls, or you might have 40.

And now I'm starting to wonder if training myself to jump to it when there's a call is bleeding over into the rest of my life. First I realized that it's impossible to do any task that requires lengthy concentration during my breaks at work. I would go in thinking "I'm going to work on building this presentation today!" and leave berating myself for having done exactly nothing. But the reality is that for a creative task like that, you - or at least, I - need time to muster the concentration and mental resources it requires. I can't just dive in for 5 minutes, or 10, and be productive. So I moved to tasks that I don't have to really settle into to get going: looking up places to get good used tires for my car, reading facebook articles I'd saved for later, that kind of thing.

But now I'm also noticing that it's become harder for me to sit down and concentrate. In my free time I've become liable to rushing around, distracted, cleaning things here and there, thinking of things I should be doing, trying to make lists and only half succeeding, thinking of things I could be doing... it's been increasingly difficult to settle down. What a curious thing, no? I'm not sure how much of this I can really blame on the job. For one thing, I'm sure other people feel like this. Moms, and people who keep very busy. And I'm sure lots of different things can make someone more scatterbrained than usual. But me, I really enjoy concentrating, and am craving centeredness. I'm thinking I need to start some practices that will help me concentrate, settle in to  something, and do it well.

On the Fruit of Thanksgiving

Sometimes interpreters have to say horrible things. The same horrible things that doctors and nurse practitioners have to say. And when we do, when we as a medical team give bad news, we get to be at to be there in the big, scary moments where people forget themselves - or rather, decide that other people's eyes and opinions don't matter in light of the magnitude of what they're feeling - and react.

One time, I helped tell a matriarch and her family that her grandchild would likely be lost to her. She contained herself until everything had been said, and then let loose her grief. When she did, she began sobbing and praying in the same breath. And where I might have expected her to plead with God for her child's life, as I have seen many people do, she instead began giving heart-wrenching thanks. "Thank you Papito Dios for my children. Thank you Papito Dios for letting me hold him in my arms yesterday. Thank you Papito Dios for the time you gave me with him. Gracias, gracias..." she continued.

Her family rose instantly from their chairs to surround her, and in that clump of sobbing, grieving, praying people I saw the fruit of a long-standing relationship between this woman and her God. It floored me. She must have practiced thanking him for everything she could think of for years. It must be a very routine, normal thing for her to find something to say "thank you" for in the face of difficult, hard circumstances - otherwise how could she have done it in this, her moment of deepest pain?

And the way she addressed God was so familiar and deeply affectionate. A rough English translation would be "Daddy God," but in English, the word "daddy" is mostly used by young children, so it carries a sense of childishness. People pray this way in English too. The idea is that Jesus addressed God in the Biblical text as "Abba," and because through Jesus' sacrifice and resurrection people who choose to follow him have been grafted into God's family as children, they can now call God "Abba" as well. It is translated as "daddy," in English, but it still makes me a little uncomfortable. It sounded even more odd to me in Spanish though, because "papito" in Spanish isn't used in the same context as "Daddy," it isn't used by children. It's actually an affectionate way for parents to refer to children or older women to younger men. She had taken this word "papito" that is usually semi-parental and flipped it. Suddenly it meant "dear daddy God" instead of "little man." Because it's such an everyday word, and because of how easily it rolled off her tongue, it sounded both deeply intimate and well-worn. It sounded like it carried the undercurrent of love you might hear in a pet name used by a couple that's been happily married for 40 years.

For me, hearing her give thanks in such an intimate way to someone she considers to be in control of everything that happens, including this loss, cut me to the heart. And the way she was doing it, too. She was verbalizing the good thing that was being lost and expressing thanks for it in the midst of its being taken away, all toward a being she considers to be in control of both the giving and the loss. She wasn't asking for it back, or asking for the loss not to happen. Not that she won't - this was just her first reaction to the news. But this being her first reaction to her possible loss made her pain more poignant to me, clarified and sharpened it. And I think what shocked me about it was that it displayed such a soft heart, unembittered by the other pains of life thus far. How had she remained so unhardened by cynicism and bitterness, especially toward God, despite surely having already lived through a lot of the usual suffering?

It is almost Thanksgiving here in the United States, a time of year we set aside to be intentionally grateful. Here, my friends, was the fruit of faith that has been mixed with consistent gratitude. I don't fully know what kept this woman's heart soft, but I'm confident that gratitude had a lot to do with it. We take one day each year to focus on being grateful. But in this woman I saw an openness to love and a resilience to pain that can come from making gratitude a consistent habit.

I am grateful for the lesson, and hope to practice it myself.

looking back

One day it occurred to me to ask my Dad what it was like going to the doctor when we lived in Spain:

"Your mother took you to most appointments after a while. Especially the emergency ones. She spoke the language better. I had to have a colonoscopy once, and there was a hospital where there was just one doctor who spoke English. It was really far away, but I went there anyway, because you know, for something that important, you want to be able to understand what they're saying to you."

This, coming from my American, white, middle-class, male father, who spent 3 years in language school when we moved to Spain. I'm not sure what other layer of privilege you could find to add to that list - by any account, he should've had it easy. Plus, my father is a smart man. He now works in think tanks on things that I barely understand, and collaborates with people in his field literally around the globe. Even so, back in Spain he avoided encountering the medical field, and when he did his access to care was severely restricted by language.

We have to quit faulting people for not being able to communicate with us like native speakers when they're not. My Dad learned Spanish. He worked hard, for years. It was literally the main focus of his work week for the first several years we were living in country. But as an adult, there are, simply put, limits to what you can learn, no matter how hard you try. Plus, you learn language based on the context you need it for. So if you're not in and out of the doctor's office all the time, chances are you won't learn the specific language skills you need for that context, so that even if you're "fluent" for the purposes of everyday life, you're flummoxed in clinic.

My Dad didn't have access to an interpreter, so I couldn't ask him what that was like. But to his and my mother's credit, they never tried to make my sister or myself serve as their quasi-interpreters. Just as well, because we weren't learning language for the medical context either.