Lost in Translation

IN THE 1980s, I SPENT nearly 12 weeks in an Australian hospital. I learned that language is not always universal. I was a corporate auditor for General Electric, and the company had sent me to Australia for a three-month assignment. To Yankee ears, Australians have an accent. But at least we speak the same language. Or so I thought.

Within a week of getting to Australia, I was diagnosed with subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE), a serious bacterial infection of the blood. I was born with a slight heart defect which makes me more susceptible to SBE. Prior to about 1955, it was universally fatal. I don’t blame the Aussies for my infection. I’m pretty sure I contracted it before going to Australia.

The general practitioner said I needed to go to a hospital and be hooked up to intravenous penicillin 24/7. I could go to a private hospital, which would be more like a U.S. hospital, or to a hospital for veterans. I asked which had the best equipment and doctors. He said the veterans’ hospital, so I went to Concord Repatriation General Hospital in Sydney. I had never been in the military. I have no idea why I was allowed to be treated at an Australian veterans’ hospital.

Nurses are not nurses. There were no private or even semi-private rooms in the hospital. I was in a ward with 24 beds. Nurses would walk up and down between the rows. If we needed something, it was not unusual to call out for the nurse. I heard other patients call out “nurse” or “sister.”  Thinking “sister” was somewhat derogatory, I always said “nurse.”

One day, the head “nurse” confronted me.  She asked why I called her a nurse; she was a sister. I learned that, in Australia, “nurse” refers to what we would call a student nurse. Once a nurse completes training, she is a sister. Because this was a teaching hospital, we did have “nurses”—meaning student nurses—but most of the nursing staff were “sisters.”

Question: What do you call a male nurse in Australia? Answer: sister. The term sister is non-gender specific. At least a quarter of the sisters were male. It was completely acceptable to call a male nurse “sister.” I was insulting them by calling them “nurse.”

Doctors are not always doctors. After the head sister got me straightened out about calling her sister, not nurse, she asked why I called my doctor “doctor.”

“Because he’s a doctor,” I stammered.

“No, he is a mister,” she replied emphatically.

It took me several more minutes to understand. In Australia, a specialist is no longer a doctor. He or she is a mister or missus.

Not only had I been insulting all of the nurses by calling them “nurse,” I had also been insulting my doctor by calling him “doctor.”

Several years ago, I told this story to a business professor colleague, who was English and had just come to the States. He looked at me with amazement. “You mean you don’t call the best doctors mister or missus?” I assured him we did not. He explained that he had been looking for an eye specialist in St. Louis, our nearest large city, and he was frustrated that all he could find were doctors. None was a mister or missus. He assumed this meant St. Louis had no top-flight eye doctors.

Theaters are not always for shows. At one point, I completely lost my appetite and began to become jaundiced. My doctor decided to inject my blood with dye and take some X-rays.

Soon after, a sister came to my bedside and said the doctor wanted me to go to theater that afternoon. I told the sister that I appreciated the doctor’s concern. I was glad he was trying to cheer me up, but I really didn’t feel like going to the theater. I also silently wondered what type of movies they would show to veterans in a military hospital. All I could imagine was a movie that told soldiers not to have sex with the locals to avoid venereal diseases. The nurse emphatically told me that I would be going to theater that afternoon. Again, I graciously declined.

I finally understood. “Theater” is what we would call “operating room.” In the early days of surgery, it was common for medical residents to stand on a second-floor balcony and watch the surgeon work. It was a theater in a very real sense. They had found an aneurysm in my abdomen and wanted to remove it before it ruptured. I did go to theater that afternoon. Instead of watching a show, I was the show. The operation was a success.

That wasn’t the end of the idiosyncrasies I encountered. Here are four more:

“Tucker” is food or appetite. If I didn’t eat much, the sister would often say, “Off your tucker today?” The first time she said this, I had absolutely no idea what she meant.
“Vegemite” is a brown, thick paste made from brewers’ yeast and spread on toast. Similar to English Marmite, it tastes horrendous—unless you’re Australian or English.
“Wheetabix” is the brand name of a popular cereal. Somewhat similar to our Shredded Wheat.
There was one television in a common lounge for the 24 of us in that ward. An afternoon rerun was Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. It was similar to our Lassie, but instead of a dog saving the family from some catastrophe, it was a kangaroo.

I should have been on intravenous penicillin for just four weeks. But for some reason, I wasn’t getting better. At the six-week point, GE paid for my wife to come to Australia. She was there for the last two weeks of May and almost all of June. While it was turning to summer in the northern hemisphere, it was getting colder in Australia and she had not packed for winter.

My wife set by my bedside faithfully. I did persuade her to take one day off and visit a local zoo. Koalas sleep about 20 hours per day and always look peaceful. She learned that Koalas get enough moisture from Eucalyptus leaves that they can go for weeks without leaving a Eucalyptus tree. She was also told that Eucalyptus leaves contain a mild narcotic. Those peaceful looking Koalas are happy because they sit there happily ingesting narcotics.

For what it’s worth, the Australian Koala Foundation disagrees.

Larry Sayler is the only person with a Wharton MBA who also graduated from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s Clown College. Earlier in his career, he served as CFO for three manufacturing and service organizations. For 16 years before his retirement, Larry taught accounting at a small Christian college in the Midwest. His brother Kenyon also writes for HumbleDollar. Check out Larry's earlier articles.

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