Saturday Evening in the Hospital

When we got home after the beach, Troels, Ivan and I scooped up Leonard, piled into Ivan’s company car and drove to the pizza restaurant. We were stalled several times by the tired and bumpy engine. The setting was well-lit, the waitress was lovely and smiley, “I like your earrings”, I said. They were big and sparkly and lit up her face. But somehow I’d forgotten not to make that error. She quickly removed them and said, “now, they’re yours”. Eek, Ghanaian hospitality! It’s exceptionally rude to refuse. I got round it by saying, “I really like them on you; please, I don’t want to take them away”. The pizza was good, but I couldn’t eat it all. My chest was hurting now; I couldn’t sit comfortably.

In the car on the way home, every time we went over a bump I gave a little yelp with pain. Troels caught my face wincing in the rear-view mirror, “Guys I think it’s really bad”. Ivan turned round from driving and said that we should go to hospital. No, I didn’t think we needed to, it’s just the side effects of Mefloquine; it will go away tomorrow. I guess I didn’t want to give everyone the hassle of waiting at the hospital, pay another series of expenses, and then have the embarrassment of being told to go away again.

We arrived back at Mummy’s place and again the discussion of the hospital was brought up. Leonard concluded, “If you are in Europe you can say- let’s see how you feel in the morning- but here, you might be dead by morning”. It seemed a little dramatic, but since we had all received news from Ivan this week of a 26 year old French embassy worker who’d been found dead after two days in his own vomit, it also felt plausible. OK let’s just wait 20 minutes and see. I’ll make a decision. After 10 minutes Ivan found me crunched in pain on the sofa and so we piled in a taxi and went off to hospital.

It was the same process- payment followed by waiting outside the doctor’s door with the receipt. I was called in. The doctor kept a determinedly vacant expression throughout his examination.
“Is it bad that I mixed the anti-malaria medication?” I asked.
“For now, it’s OK”.
The words were utterly meaningless. Troels interpreted it later as, “yes it’s really bad, but there’s nothing you can do about it now so don’t worry about it”.

The doctor sent me to the lab for a malaria test. I had to queue at the kiosk to pay for it first. A sample of my blood was taken and we would have to wait one hour for the result. It felt like a very long hour. We walked slowly to an ice-cream place next door, the pain was intensifying and walking was difficult. There’s nothing quite like the anxiety of wondering why you’re ill.

I really appreciated their willingness to come with me and sit for over two hours. Through boredom they had become quite amusing. The series of jokes kept resulting in us all laughing, except that for me the movement in my ribs caused excruciating pain which made me panic slightly and the panic made me stop being able to breathe, which worried me more, and I would have to bite my arm or walk away and not look at any of them. The expression “cracking up” had never really meant so much.

Ivan turned to me and said in his French accent, “I’m sorry, but I really don’t understand how, if you are now taking two malaria medications, ‘how you can possibly have malaria?”

I went to retrieve the results from the lab and brought back the sheet and waited again outside the doctor’s room. I was holding the answer, but despite Leonard checking over the boxes closely at length with German precision, its contents were meaningless to us. There were two people ahead of me in the queue.

In the medical examination room, the doctor looked at the paper with a blank face and started writing. I sat patiently and he kept on writing.
“Excuse me, but what is the result?”
“The result is as I thought when I first examined you”
“Ah, yes?” My fists were quite tightly clenched.
“You have a chest infection… the result for malaria is negative”.

Relief spread through me thawing the tension from the top of my head to the ends of my fingers. A chest infection! It explained everything over the past month- the fatigue, the blocked ears, the goose bumps and odd feverish spell, the almost passing out with exercise, the cough that hadn’t yet gone away, the acid feeling in my throat, the mouth ulcers, the headaches and now the excruciating pain in my chest. The vomiting was food poisoning, the stomach ache was chilli and the rash was probably the Mefloquine. Each morsel of unexplained occurrence was deliciously accounted for.

Sometimes it’s knowledge we crave above all else. As a race we don’t do well without answers. But unlike the existence of our universe, I was holding the answer to this and it’s antidote in the sweaty palm of my hand. I took the slip of paper he gave me to the clerk to pay and then to the mini onsite pharmacist window where I saw the clerk had written someone else’s name on my form and I had to go and change it and then come back again for the medicine. I had an injection for the pain, in a little room called ‘injections’, but I had to wake the nurse up first who was in a deep sleep lying on the counter and I had to shout quite loudly, which was difficult.

I came back and found Leonard sitting in a wheelchair close to the entrance next to an amused Ghanaian couple and he was pointing out some of his grey hairs to them. My ribs rocked with silent laughter; finally we could all go home and sleep.

And just as the episode was coming to an end, I became slowly aware, like a clam opening on a rock, that the intensifying pain in my mouth wasn’t an ulcer but a wisdom tooth coming through jagged and jutting into the inside of my cheek. A new chapter was simply beginning.