Know your audience

I looked over at my father, pale and eyes closed on his bed, in the Intensive Care Unit in the local hospital. He had an oxygen mask up to his face and tubes running from his chest and arms to various machines beside him.

I stared a long time at him before looking up at his doctor and back over to my mother. The cardiologist was wearing his required white coat and was explaining what was going on with my father’s heart. A few days earlier, my father had passed out and started convulsing, with frothy saliva coming out of his mouth, on our living room sofa. He had a severe heart attack and had been rushed to the hospital. 

What’d he say?

In the days since, a flurry of doctors and nurses were attending to my dad. The cardiologist was the latest in the long line of specialists and was deep into his explanation. I could tell my mother was picking up little of what he was saying. I tried to keep up, but the doctor spoke very poor English. On top of it, his explanation sounded like he was lecturing to a group of residents.

He could have simply said: “A heart attack happens when the flow of blood that brings oxygen to a part of your heart muscle suddenly becomes blocked. Your heart can’t get enough oxygen. If blood flow is not restored quickly, the heart muscle will start to die.” Good old Google gave me that description. God, I wish the Internet existed back then. Instead he threw around words like myocardial infarction, atherosclerosis, supraventricular tachycardia, transient ischaemic attack, and a few other words that went through one ear and out the other.

As an 12-year-old kid, all I made out of the cardiologist’s gobbledygook was that my father’s outlook looked dim. I was more interested in playing Strat-o-matic Baseball, an old school fantasy baseball game that you played with dice and cards, than serious adult stuff, but my world had been thrown into a crazy out-of-control spin. The doctor, though, was from an another planet. He may as well have been speaking Klingon from Star Trek than the English language.

Hospital gobbledygook

I picked up a word or two. I remember “ventricular” and “aorta” sticking out and I would perk up every time I heard a word I knew, remembering what we learned in Science class, but he would soon lose me again with another fifty cent word. To make matters worse, he had the bedside manner of a statue. His stone cold somber face failed to acknowledge my mother’s pain or worry. He would say things like “irreparable harm” and “permanently disabled” and my each time my mother would shutter and silently weep. The doctor never slowed down, never showed a bit of care or concern for my mother. He kept moving full speed ahead, he was going to marvel us with his brilliance and intelligence hell or high water, compassion and empathy be damned.

The memory is burned into my brain. I suspect that it’s no surprise that I would go from thinking “hey doctors and nurses have a cool job” to growing up and having little interest in medicine or science and instead pursuing communications. I was just a kid, but I remember wanting to tell the doctor “to read your audience.”

“Can you explain it in common English?”

At that age, I was much too meek and respectful to call the doctor the $@%$ that he was. I was taught to respect my elders, but I did something that surprised my mother. (And still surprises me today.) When he finally stopped to take a breath, I asked the doctor to slow down and this time explain in words we could understand. I didn’t give him a chance to walk away. I grabbed his clipboard and pointed to something and said something to the effect: “We’re waiting.” He looked down at me shocked.

He looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time. He stuttered and stepped back. I forget if his explanation got any better, but I’ll never forget the the look of confusion on his face and how the act of “remembering your audience” registered with me.

Be kind to others

My father would stay in the hospital a few more weeks, before eventually coming home. He would get a quadruple bypass surgery a few years later, but he was never able to go back to his job at the local steel mill. Fortunately for us, though, his doctors got better.

At least their explanations got better.

We all come across instances where people forget about the their audience at work and home. Have you ever had this happen to you? How did you respond?