Your Heart is the Size of Your Fist by Martina Scholtens

Author:Martina Scholtens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchwood Editions
Published: 2017-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

16

AN OVERSIZED PINK UTERUS FLANKED by a matching set of ovaries was projected onto the wall. Eleven Myanmar women gazed at it, paper plates of cake balanced on their laps. As I began to explain the anatomy, one of them abruptly walked up to the screen, spread her arms wide, and clapped a hand over each ovary. “I know this,” she said, quiet and proud. “I know this!” The others murmured and nodded. She had been a health instructor at their refugee camp.

The nurse and I had organized this women’s health group visit for the new Myanmar arrivals who had been attending our Vancouver clinic over the past few months. They were Karens, an ethnic minority who had lived for up to twenty years in remote camps along the Thai-Myanmar border. None of them were familiar with cervical screening or mammography, and most of their pregnancies were unplanned. Teaching them as a group, we reasoned, would be much more efficient than the individual counselling we were currently doing.

And here they were, eating snacks in our clinic’s meeting room, a collection of women aged eighteen to seventy-eight who’d taken the bus in from Langley together that morning. I felt like a hostess, responsible for the event’s success and concerned that the guests enjoy themselves; I was relieved that they’d shown up at all. These were considerations foreign to a typical clinic day in my office.

That nervous feeling—that I was on unfamiliar ground, outside the comfortable routine of one patient, one exam room, twenty minutes—was the first suggestion that moving all of us into this new context might result in something unexpected.

Our experience to this point was that the Myanmar women were particularly pleasant patients: uncomplaining, compliant, deferential to a fault. Consequently, eliciting any kind of medical history was a real challenge. Repeatedly I found myself seated across from a slight, smiling woman in a bright woven skirt, with just a hint at a problem, doing the medical version of twenty questions. I worried that I’d miss a diagnosis because the history depended almost completely on me; I wasn’t sure a patient would divulge a symptom like severe right lower quadrant pain unless I enquired about it directly.

But here as a group, with an interpreter, the women were transformed. They interrupted our presentations with comments and anecdotes. They asked questions and made jokes. There was a continuous soft running commentary the entire morning, and the atmosphere was congenial, even festive.

Susu, the interpreter, had come to Canada as a Myanmar refugee herself ten years earlier. She interpreted at clinics and hospitals across the city, sometimes disregarding the rules and transporting patients to appointments in her own car. She interpreted the sermon on Sundays at the church the Karens attended. She wouldn’t call me by my first name, but surreptitiously paid for my lunch one day when we found ourselves at the same neighbourhood restaurant.

The nurse showed a slide with an image of a heap of packaged condoms in a rainbow of colours. There was laughter and discussion in the Karen language.

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