On Being Un-Empathetic

So there was this once when we were on community health service visit to a patient's house. Patient's actually a pregnant lady from China, who was married to a local Chinese man. Being 30 weeks pregnant, she had her antenatal follow up in one of the local government clinic. See, the good thing about the Malaysian healthcare system is, they actually have a home-visiting services! Anyway, that aside, we were to tag along these home visits to see what exactly happened.

So. In the house...

It was quite lucky for the nurse because she'd got 3 Chinese medical students who could help her translate what she wanted to say to the patient, rather than her talking to someone else in the family who could understand the Malay language, and then only convey the message to the patient. So there we were, helping the nurse to translate whatever she wanted to say.

Nurse: Tell the patient to come for this ultrasound scan on this date.
Friend: ching chong chang ching chong chang. (Mandarin translation)

Nurse: She also need to come for her blood glucose monitoring. Need to fast overnight. Then come to take blood, then straight after that have something to eat. 2 hours later come in again to take blood.
Friend: cheng chang ching chong cheng chang chong ching (Mandarin translation)

Nurse: Remember to tell her she's got diabetes already.

Friend without any hesitant and rearrangement of his words, "You know now you have diabetes?"

The patient was in mute for a while, then finally gained herself back, still in shock, "Wha? Diabetes? How come? Last pregnancy I was normal. How come?"

So we tried to tell her it could plainly be due to chance. But she's got some risks, i.e. age, previous big baby and all.

After all that, she was still gasping her calm self, "I can't believe it. How come I will get diabetes? I am supposed to be normal, I work out a lot..."


Well. You don't get what I mean do you? Perhaps it wasn't that big a bad news, but to the patient, I believe it was something serious, especially when it comes to the diagnosis of something so severe and chronic.
"You know you have diabetes?"

That's just too harsh, I thought.