A while ago we treated a patient with severe hypoglycaemia. We had received the information from his girlfriend that he does not speak German. But in English we could easily communicate with him. “Please, open your eyes.” “Could you give me your right hand?” The man didn’t respond. Instead, he spoke in a language none of us had ever heard before. The thought could have arisen: “Is he kidding us?”
No, he didn’t want to. We quickly realized that. The man was confused and insecure, constantly trying to get up when he wasn’t supposed to. We explained it to him again and again in English. But it seemed like none of that was getting through to him.
We asked his girlfriend to come with us. Maybe she could understand him. The woman spoke French to our patient, which is how the two usually communicated. It did not work. He also spoke to her in the language unknown to us.
It was his mother tongue, as his girlfriend later told us. He came from a country where different ethnic groups used different national languages. The woman recognized the language as such, but understood it just as little as we did. The man had learned French and English as second languages.
Intensive care specialist Pola Gülberg from the Ebersberger district clinic.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
This is exactly where the highlight lay: The man was in an unknown position in a German hospital, connected to many cables and hoses, monitors beeping around him and people scurrying around – an emergency situation. The brain works differently than in known situations. In the man’s case, this meant that his body was so busy dealing with the consequences of hypoglycaemia that there was no strength to open the drawers with English or French words. There was only access to the mother tongue, because this drawer is the easiest to open for each of us.
Such reactions are not exceptional. It is important that we have them on the screen so that we can react accordingly. So we asked his girlfriend to be with him a lot. Even without speaking, her familiar face had a calming effect on the man. With the help of our facial expressions and gestures, we created a fear-free atmosphere, for example through a lot of eye contact. Also, we continued to speak to him in English, slowly and clearly in a calm voice. After all, we didn’t know if he might understand something.
As his condition improved, he became increasingly responsive to our spoken words. After a few days we were able to converse with him fluently in English – the drawers for his second languages were freely accessible again.
Pola Gülberg is an intensive care nurse. In this column, the 38-year-old talks about her work at the district clinic in Ebersberg every week. The collected texts are below sueddeutsche.de/thema/Auf Station to find.