Four weeks, four hospitals: my medical tour of Cameroon
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 06/Mar/2011 18:19, 34 days ago
Apart from onebout of malariaI’ve been extremely healthy since coming to Cameroon, but my run of luck failed last month. During the month of February I went on seven visits to four hospitals in four towns, had five blood tests, cried in two hospital lobbies, and was prescribed eight different types of medication, at least fourof which I’m sure were completely useless.First I had malaria in Maga. The only problem here was that all the staff at Maga hospital know me as I’ve spent a lot of time doing sensitisations on birth certificates there, and they were all much more interested in having a chat than diagnosing me. The hospital bursar only stopped talking about my parents’ visits and sold me a blood test after fifteen minutes when the nurse came in and pointedly reminded him I was a patient.Two weeks later, despite having re-tested negative for malaria, I still wasn’t feeling great, so I went to the CNPS hospital in Maroua. This is where rich Northerners go: there are rooms with air conditioning, they have receipts with holograms on, and unlike the hospital at Maga there are no people lying on the floor or goats in the courtyard. They also have a reputationfor giving as much expensive treatment to white people as possible, whether it’s needed or not. True to form the doctor sent me to have all sorts of very expensive blood tests, including (mysteriously, as I’m pretty sure I had no rheumatic symptoms) for rheumatism, which all came back negative.Undaunted the doctor prescribed me lots of a drug called Erythromycin.Innocently believing in his medical expertise I dutifully took the pills as ordered, which gave me terrible abdominal pains. I promptly stopped taking them and looked them up on the Internet, where I discovered that he’d told me to takefour timesthe recommended dosage. I resolved to avoid Cameroonian doctors in the future and trust only in my immune system.This resolution was broken a week later in the capital, Yaounde, where I went from facilitating a workshop on corruption to a forty degree fevered delirium in slightly less than three hours. The nice people from the VSO office took me to a mission hospital with giant Biblical quotes on the wall. The main thing I registered here was that there were no chairs in the waiting area, only benches, but I couldn’t actually sit up on a bench any more. I looked round hopefully to see if anyone else was having the same problem and had developed a creative solution such as lying down on the bench, but they were all sitting disappointingly straight. I eventually got round this major hospital design flaw by going and sitting in the car.The fever went away, but I developed a cough which my doom saying and imaginative friends suggested was caused by anything from pneumonia to worms in my lungs, and convinced me to go on another hospital trip once we got back to Maroua. Since I was boycotting the CNPS hospital after their trigger-happy approach to medication I decided to go to the mission hospital in the neighbouring town of Meskine. This was built and run by missionaries from the American Deep South, has the best medical reputation in the Extreme North (missionaries run the best hospitals here), and even has foreign doctors.I wasn’t quite at the point where I felt comfortable being the expat who marches into the hospital and demands to see a white doctor, but I definitely didn’t want to see anyone else trained in Cameroon either. I solved this dilemma by playing down my level of French at reception and asking to see ‘an English-speaking doctor’, and my tactics paid off when I got to see a Dutch doctor, who was not only super-nice, but was also a woman (female doctors areveryrare in Cameroon). She diagnosed me with bronchitis, told me there wasn’t much she could do about it, and that it would probably go away on its own.Anyway, it did, and I’m completely fine now. But I’ve also stopped to think about the fact that in a month alone I spent well over 40,000 CFA (over £50) on tests, consultations and medication for problems that weren’t even that serious, all of which was reimbursed by VSO’s medical policy. A lot of that was money wasted on bad medical care. That’s well over double what a parent-paid teacher earns in a month.