Today was all about middle-aged ladies: one as tough as nails, another who confusingly smiles when feeling pain, and yet another who hides neither her pain nor her gratitude.
Would you like to take a guess at which of the above was the Chief’s wife?
…
If you guessed at “tough as nails”, please pat yourself on the back for having finely tuned intuition!
I got a call at 7am from one of the Chief’s daughters (not the one who got appendicitis, although she is recovering well) saying that her mother had hurt her foot with a spade. I rolled out of bed with a groan (yes, Saturday early morning isn’t a pretty sight in Marcus’s world!), dashed to the Dispensary and put together a basic patch-up kit. I know the way to the Chief’s house well by now as I have been making house calls every few days to check on his daughter’s appendicectomy wound healing.
So apparently, the Chief’s wife often gets up at the crack of dawn to go clay-digging with some of her contemporaries (also tough as nails)… and during an over-enthusiastic push of the spade, she stabbed herself in the big toe, slicing it open along a 2cm line going diagonally and deeply into the flesh.
What does this lady do: freak out and cry at all the blood pouring out? Nope, she ties a handkerchief round it and makes the walk home on her own. Then she climbs up to her house’s roof terrace where her daughters are cooking up breakfast, and THEY decide to call me!
If that’s not tough enough for you yet, here’s what she then put up with, without a single complaint:
Having the wound thoroughly cleaned with saline and iodine (OUCH!), being injected with lidocaine local anaesthetic with a fat needle meant for intramuscular injections in the backside and not for insertion in toes, me shoving and heaving at the needle to try to get the suture through her leather-like super tough toe skin (she was actually laughing – as was I!), and having no less than three such sutures put in with needle and thread meant for abdominal tissue closure, not fine needlework on a toe!
As a sign of appreciation, her daughters cooked up two chapattis for me for breakfast, so I could take them to the Dispensary with me as my Saturday massage clients were about to turn up. The Chief also came by to see what we were all doing, and proudly showed me how his 15-month-old grandson could blow kisses and bump fists. Very cute, both to see the tricks, and the grand kid and the grandfather so fond of each other!
Several fist bumps later, I dashed off to the Dispensary. Soon enough a regular Saturday patient turned up with her usual pains. The problem is that she does not speak English and she tends to smile a lot. Today, I had invited the house girl from Wendy’s guesthouse to come to the Dispensary with me to learn some new massage techniques, as she has done basic massage training and offers treatments to the guests. And that of course meant I had someone to translate! It turned out that each time the lady was smiling, it was in fact because something was hurting, but she was trying to be polite about it! That put a whole new twist to the treatment I had been giving her…
As soon as she was gone, hopefully with more of a heart-felt smile on her face, another lady hobbled in, obviously in a LOT of pain. I recognised her as the rather cheeky villager who had got her son to pull me out of the English class teaching earlier in the week so I could check some medicine for her, and she also used the opportunity to complain her back was hurting. I was not in consulting mode, with my 17 teenage students getting louder and louder inside the classroom behind me, so I told her to take painkillers and come see me Saturday, which was today.
As Naima and I painstakingly got her on the treatment couch, I got a feeling something more than “normal” lower back pain was going on. The lady was a known diabetic who had run out of her medicine and was waiting for someone to bring a new supply to her from Mombasa. I saw some results from a kidney function test that indicated the diabetes was damaging them significantly. She was also losing sensation in her toes. So was this back pain her kidneys complaining? Or was she being a bit dramatic and attention-seeking, like when she had me come out of class to see her right there and then? The painkillers hadn’t worked at all, she said. Hmmm…
After a few function tests and some deep tissue prodding, it was clear that the pain in her right hip and lower back, radiating down the back of her leg, was not in her imagination, but most probably a “slipped” (herniated) disc in her spinal column. Not something to mess around with! She was very happy and grateful to get a referral letter for imaging to verify my diagnosis and check for other spinal problems, and instructions to rest in bed for several days, AND to get the strongest painkillers they could offer her in Lamu town!
Then I had 30min to sit and send some distance energy healing to the Chief’s wife’s toe, to supplement the physical suturing work I had done, before she was scheduled to come for a tetanus booster injection. Better safe than sorry, as she said it was definitely more than 10 years since the last one – and who knows what sort of dirt was on that spade in the clay!
That unpleasant injection, deep in her deltoid muscle, also went down without a single squeak of complaint from her. I could try to pass it off as my well-rehearsed intramuscular injection technique causing her no pain, but I know those injections can sting like something evil. One of her sons stood in the doorway looking proudly at her all the while, telling me she is a brave woman. I could not agree more, and I can see why she is the wife of the Chief!
A good reminder, all this, about pain -and how we hide it, disguise it, show it and sometimes flaunt it.
I know one thing for sure: if the Chief’s wife ever turns up to pull me out of teaching for an emergency consult, I will drop everything in my hands and run to her, because it’ll probably be nothing less than someone about to die somewhere!
