This
was an incident that I happened to observe at a hospital in Singapore.
The patient, an old man from China,was in such a critical situation that
he needed to be admitted right away to the medical ward.Patient was assigned
to bed number 4. However, the patient's family member was not satisfied
and consistently requested for a bed change.The reason was that number 4 was a homonym for “death” in Chinese.The nurse
manager explained to the family members that the hospital then was
experiencing a severe shortage of beds due to high patient load and it
would take as soon as 2 days to get another bed available. It was
imperative to let patient have treatment at the ward right away.
Surprisingly enough, patients’ family members agreed to forgo bed
number 4 and let the patient stay in the emergency department until
another vacant bed was ready.
Due
to such procrastination,the patient was in coma for 3 weeks and would not
likely to recover. On top of that, the family was then in a state of financial difficulty.Therefore,
the doctors suggested a humanitarian death as an ultimate solution for
him. However, again, the medical team encountered one significant issue : the cultural barrier.The
family members took their suggestion in such a negative way that they
became so agitated and requested for a transfer to another hospital.
The
medical staff tried to explain their viewpoint but to no avail.
Finally, the patient was shifted to another hospital as per request.
Analysis :
The
above story might sound very awkward to some of us .How could one
allow the life of his/her beloved one to be endangered due to such
ridiculous matter of a bed number ? However,strictly speaking, number
four has been well-known to be an unlucky number in Chinese culture.Due
to that, many numbered product lines skip the "four". For example, Nokia
phone does not have a series number starting with 4. Some buildings skip
floor 4 or replace the number with the letter "F", particularly in
heavily Asian areas. And there is absolutely no table number 4 in a
Chinese wedding dinner....Assumed that you were educated by your parents
with such strongly fixed mind against number 4, chances are you would not
know other better way to behave than the above Chinese family did.
Another
underlying issue was the delicate and sensitive topic of death. Death
has been such a taboo across cultures that it leads to conversational
unease or even disruption.After all, number 4 was not
well-received because it implies death.The extent in which people
accept death and how much they are willing to talk about it varies from
culture to culture. In this case, the Chinese family had rather extreme
preconceptions about it. As a consequence,such ideas have hindered
them from saving their own family member from the hand of death.
