What do you get if you take one 70 year old farmer, one sharp thorn scraping his leg and 30 days without antibiotics and proper wound care? Yep – my second emergency trip by boat to the district hospital with a patient!
The farmer was rather jovial and good-natured throughout, despite his enormous pain on walking and the reeking smell attracting most of Shela’s fly population. Maybe it was fortunate I was too tired to gag by the time I saw him and the oozing wound on his right leg, which was twice the size of the other leg!
Tomorrow is officially my day off, but I will be spending the first part of it at the hospital helping with the farmer’s wound debridement surgery, after I got him some much-needed IV antibiotics there this afternoon. Fortunately I like doing that sort of surgical stuff, as it’s possibly not everyone’s idea of the perfect day of rest!
I can feel the tiredness sinking in though… Four days of non-stop patients in the daytime at the Dispensary and then teaching at the primary school in the evening. I have esconded to a high roof terrace at a hotel in Shela village to watch the sunset, spend a bit of time alone (with a roast chicken) and enjoy not having anyone wanting anything from me for a few hours.
Memories from the last few days float past as my mind unwinds from all the intense concentration and emotion…
The anger of the elderly Somali woman with an extraordinarily high blood pressure of 220/120 (I checked four times to be sure!), a heart murmur, papilloedema and a severe headache, who I told to go straight to the hospital when she just wanted some pills… Maybe my patient rapport skills were diminished by the need for double translation assistance: English to Swahili, and Swahili to Somali!
The pride and joy of my primary school English class as they told the headmaster the story we had composed together of six blind men describing an elephant. I taught them the expression “the moral of the story is…” and they puzzled with curiosity over the idea of six people having a completely different experience of the very same elephant-situation.
The cheekiness of healthcare assistant Mariam’s smile as she tried to get me to hold a gigantic prawn she told me was dead… but then it wriggled with all its many legs as I was about to stretch out my hand to take it!
Islam the lab analyst’s keenness to show me a slide under the microscope with malaria in a blood sample – malaria is thankfully very rare in Shela, with no cases so far this year. That makes Islam’s life a bit less exciting though.
The brave silent tears of the young footballer with tendonitis in his hip, as I did a deep deep stretch on his psoas major muscle, with the team coach helping me and learning some sports massage techniques at the same time.
The utter amazement on Hamisi the Dispensary gardener’s face as he learnt how to look inside Mariam’s eye with my ophthalmoscope – how many people have seen the back of another person’s eye? He couldn’t get over the specialness of it and high-fived me repeatedly!
The confidence of the little kids in the village offering me their hand to shake when they walk past – and after our handshake, they touch their fingertips to their heart… or nose! It’s a bit like bringing the energy of the exchange into their being for honouring. I may start doing the same!
The embarrassment I feel at my own mild case of prosopagnosia (inability to recognise faces), as villagers greet me with warm smiles and ask “do you remember me?” I can just smile and hope they don’t ask me what their name is or where I met them before! I mistook one of the Chief’s brothers for the Chief yesterday, and then a fisherman tried to take advantage of me by saying he was the one who had given me a ride from the airport on Manda island to Lamu island when I arrived, and please could I lend him some money to fix his sails… Then my keen sense of smell thankfully rescued me, as I would have noticed if the real boatman who took me across had such a particular body odour about him!
And as the sun now finally touches down on the horizon, after searing across these Kenyan skies yet another time, I remember the immense gratitude in my heart at my friends’ (and their friends’) response to my urgent request for medicines and clinical supplies for the Dispensary – I look forward to the arrival of the Package Cavalry. It will be like Christmas for Mariam, Islam, all the patients and I. Thank you for your support, which helps to remind me that I don’t have to do all this alone.
Love and gratitude to you all.
