Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Health Care: IV

For those of you worried about my well-being, you are in good company. The director of the University hospital popped in to say that he promised my program director that I would get better. To do that, he said that he would need to restart my treatment. I explained to him why I had stopped and that no one tells me anything, that being in a hospital in a foreign country where people talk about you in their native (Twi) language is rather intimidating. Unbeknownst to him, he was also capitalizing on my regret about stopping treatment. Thus, I listened to good reason and restarted. A new IV insert was jabbed in below my veins. The medication began flowing once more. I managed to fall asleep too.

Morning arrived with the pervasive calls of a rooster. My IV had run dry again but it restarted without the painful jump-start. My program director had brought silverware but breakfast was a piece of bread with a bowl of hot chocolate. I felt much better, quantum leaps better. I even finished the Clancy novel.

Sitting in a chair outside my room people watching, a woman came up and we got to talking. I found another chair and learned that she was a former Foreign Service Officer (FSO) with Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). Her first posting had been in Togo and upon her arrival, she found that a man would not stop bothering her and they eventually married. Since he was also an FSO, she had to resign as it was understood at the time that married women could not serve with their husbands in the work place. Her most memorable post was to Washington where her husband served as Deputy Chief of Mission, a position outranked only by the Ambassador. They lived in an all-white neighborhood in Bethesda MD. The first weekend after she arrived, her husband hosted a neighborhood cookout and she got to meet all of the neighbors. She said she wondered how the neighbors would act around her as they did not know her achievements, working with the MFA before she met her husband, and some may have expected a bush wife. But everyone was very cordial and she got many requests for recipes of the
Ghanaian dishes she served in addition to the standard American fare of hot dogs and hamburgers. What a break from the boredom!

Unfortunately, my second day in the hospital turned into a second night. My program director talked to the doctor before seeing me over her lunch break and apparently they wanted to pump me full of cipro to get rid of the bad food. I think my body did a fairly good job at this all on its own but I did not argue. She wrote a list of things I would need and promised to be back later that evening.

Coming back, she brought a pair of sheets to replace my sole hospital issued sheet, a few more books, my cellphone (which of course did not work well in that part of Legon), and other things to get me through one last night.

Morning arrived before I knew it. In fact, I awoke to see the doctor looking through my chart. She asked if I had any complaints which in my newly awaken-ness was having trouble comprehending exactly what she meant. This woman had been terse from the start and was very annoyed that I could not understand what she thought was a basic question. My request for elaboration discerned that she wanted to know about pain and if I had any other ailments. No was thankfully an easy answer and I went back to sleep. Later that morning, I walked up the hall to see if I could be discharged the last IV had finally been exhausted. They removed my IV and I packed my backpack to leave. I needed 15 cedis to pay my bill but had only 13 which the nurses thankfully took. The evil IV insert came out (note how it was not before I paid my bill) and suddenly I was free from the hospital!

After telling a cab driver that 3 cedis was too much for a simple on campus ride, I walked into the hostel, triumphant that I had vanquished the vile piece of chicken! The ironic thing is that I probably could have walked out at anything except for the fact that I was not retaining what I should have been retaining. I will never complain about being in an American hospital should I ever find myself in one again!

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