In Which In The Words of Rachel Green, Aren't They A Little Cute / Young To Be Doctors?
on Zoe Page (Sierra Leone), 18/Nov/2010 18:42, 34 days ago
I am awoken at 5.30am for some traditional style obs– my BP is back to normal, and my pulse is dropping nicely, but my temp is still rising. Goodie. I have 7 new mosquito bites as a result of a night minus a net. Double goodie. If I didn’t have Malaria last night, I probably do now.Alex stops by again, bringing the requested toothpaste and hairbrush, but also some treats: a radio, some books (German and English), a Gehirnakrobatik puzzle and of course some chocolate. We choose to ignore the sign that says patients must only eat food provided by the hospital. Breakfast arrives: it’s served on the fanciest china, and just looks bizarre, like some throw back from Colonial days. I was offered a Boily Egg or Baked beans, and went for the latter. This was last night when they also asked me what I wanted for lunch and dinner...nothing like making me feel confident I’ll soon beout of here. I also get bread though it’s a little stale, so I stick to the beans. I have a massive bowl of something else, but it turns out to be milk powder to go with the mini teapot they brought me. I drop tomato sauce down my bum-baring hospital gown. I guess some things are universal, the world over.Dorcas stops by to see me, and then the Medics arrive and I get two-for-the-price-of-one. One of them’s even kinda cute. They say they need to review my labs. I tell them that no one has taken any blood yet... An hour or so later, a nurse comes to take some, and that’s it for the rest of the morning. They come and clean my room 3 times but somehow consistently miss what looks disturbingly likea previous resident’s blood clot in the shower tray. They apologize for the lack of hot water, but since I have now towel or soap, and had a good wash at the UN on Tues (how quickly standards drop...) I’m in no hurry to clean up.Lunch arrives. It is a salad with two slices of bread. As in actual slices of actual sliced bread. It’s a first for me here (rolls are the norm) but it tastes amazing. The salad comes undressed but with a bottle of balsamic vinaigrette on the side. This is progress.Two men come and hang a net over my bed. To do so I have to get up and move to the chair, with no regard for whether or not I’m steady on my feet. Then one of them putshisfeet on my bed, but he’s not tall enough, so they take my bedside cabinet, put that on the bed, and then clamber up. I’m feeling like I could introduce ladders to this country and make a mint. I explain that I hope not to be here tonight, but they say the net needs to go up anyway...which begs the question of why itwasn’t there in the first place.By 1.30pm I am bored. I have given my brain a good workout auf Deutsch and listened to the World Service until I know the headlines by heart. FIFA bribes, bird flu in china, airbus engines etc etc. A nurse comes in and asks me if I called her with my bell and if I want to‘take my bath’. No...and I don’t have a bell. But, since she’s here, I ask if I can see the doctor and get an update. She says yes and then leaves. 45 minutes later I get dressed and wander to the nurse’s station. Can I see a doctor now? She says yes, in 5 minutes, I should wait in my room. 15 minutes later I’m having A2D déjà vu – how much of my LOS could be avoided if someone would just see me? I head back to the nurse’s station and ask them to take the needle out of my wrist. It’s where they had the drip, and it’s attached by good old fashioned parcel tape. Good old fashioned parcel tape is sticky. Removing it hurts more than a bikini wax, and the long needle that keeps coming and coming does nothing to make me feel better. The nurses are fun, and we laugh and joke as I try to convince them to let me see a doctor. They have my chart, so I pick it up to read it. Idon’t understand most of it, but luckily the expected ranges are on all the lab sheets, so I can tell where I’m normal and where I’m not. Makes you think doctors don’t need to be quite so clever after all, with a cheat sheet like this. I don’t have Typhoid and my liver is fine but I do have Malaria. 280 Parasites of the stuff, to be precise. Lovely. After a bit more banter and some well-honed whinging, they let me go downstairs to wait. In the waiting room, there are binders full of American magazines. If I’d known this, I would have been down at the crack of dawn, smuggling themoff to my room. I’m just getting into an African-American Women’s mag, learning about why ‘whites drown less frequently than blacks’ when I am called. I see Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee from this morning, and they say the doctor will see me shortly. They’re not doctors? Oh, they’re finalyear med students. ‘Shortly’ takes a while, so we chat about their electives in Wales (“can’t remember the name of the place”) and Cheryl Cole and life in Salone. They have not seen my test results yet, so I tell them what they said even though this seems the wrong way round.Then the big important doc calls me in. It’s the first time I’ve seen him, but he is a charming fellow, Cambridge educated no less. He tells me the parasite count is low, and would be much higher had I not been on prophylaxis – 10 times higher, in fact. I’d also probably be half dead, so I must still keep taking the stuff. He givesme a quick physical and I don’t contradict him when he says that he’s sure I’ve given my medical history a dozen times already. I’ve not. I was asked briefly if I had had surgery or had a family history of disease, but that was it. He doesn’t quite admire the bites, bruises and burn, but he does tell me he was mad they didn’t hang a net for me, and also offers me a Tetanus which I think I should probably take since I don’t recall having one in Manchester ever, which means it’s been at least 10 years. Dude, 10 years since starting uni.I get a prescription and luckily there’s a pharmacy there so I can have it filled and put on VSO’s tab. They say it’s 35 000 Le which is about £6, so on a par with NHS prescriptions. It’s sunny out so I bounce into the fresh air and hit the supermarket for water (at last!), celebratory cookies and chocolate as a thank you for Alex then come home for a clot-free bucket bath and to slap some Eurax on my new family of bites.