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Sick In A Foreign Land

Have you ever experience getting sick while on vacation? How was your experience? Did you have problems speaking if it was in a non-English country?

Land Foreign In Sick

I haven't personally, but my husband broke his leg in 2 places whilst we were on holiday in France a couple of years ago. It was a complete nightmare, not only because of the injury, but the language barrier. The problem was that my Husband suffered from quite a few illnesses, and the hospital wanted to know his past medical history, as we couldn't speak French, it was really hard to try to get our point across to the hospital staff.
What added to making it worse, was the fact that I had to return to England with my kids, and leave my husband in a foreign country alone, and having to have a blood transfusion. It was horrible.
That was in 2004, and this year is the first year that I have even managed to get him to contemplate going back there.

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I have been to a few doctors while I have been in Asian countries. For the most part, I have been able to find someone in the hospital that can do some translation or the doctor has limited english skills. A great many of the doctors have been schooled in the US, so they can do some communication. What I can say is that if there was a problem with verbal communication with a doctor, I could write it down or hand signals are also highly effective.

I think it would be far more difficult for someone from a non-english speaking country (with limited to no english skills of their own) to communicate with a asian doctor. We had a engineer from Germany in Japan and he got sick. He said it was impossible for him to communicate with anyone at the hospital, so he called project management and they sent a interpreter. They communicated in english.

Edited: Vincenzo on 4th May, 2007 - 2:44am