on staying alive
Our security guard (well, the dude basically just opens the gate for us and watches our cars at night) has a wife of twenty years old. They have three children, she being four months pregnant. She goes to the doctor with fever. He diagnoses her with malaria without doing a single blood test on her. She goes home and takes the tablets. (the people here are not even educated about what they should or should not take when pregnant.) Next day she is much worse. She is turning all yellow and the fever is very high. Goes to the hospital, they tell her to go home and rest. Next day she can’t walk, has fever and starts becoming delirious. After four days they finally admit her. Kept saying they are still waiting for tests. They even start speculating that it could be yellow fever, which only exists in the north, really. Next day they had to revive her. Following day our guard goes to the hospital at eleven in the morning to see his wife, they told him to come back at 18:00. In the meantime, we ask one of the doctors we know to go and check on his wife. Turns out she died of a liver failure at seven in the morning (four hours before they told her husband to leave and come back.) My husband had to call him and tell him his wife has died.
Anybody living in these parts of the world know that malaria tablets ain’t the best thing for you liver. If one of the dudes could just put two and two together, actually test her before giving her pills, she would still be alive.
But hey, she has fever, let’s just give her tablets and see the next patient.
I’m so sorry. Sometimes i just have to vent about something like….hmmm, staying alive.
May 26th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
This is such a typical African story. As a Canadian living in Ghana - it never ceases to amaze me. Many of my middle class African colleagues have spouses/siblings/children/parents who die all the time for absolutely preventable reasons.
We could go on forever about the reasons for this - I do blog about it all the time - too much to go into here - but it’s worth saying that it is a crying shame that life is not worth much on this continent…
May 27th, 2009 at 8:57 am
africa.
May 27th, 2009 at 9:49 am
ja, i just feel so sorry for her kids, they can go to school here in the city, now they have to go and live with their grandparents in the north in the guachas in the middle of nowhere, ’cause there’s no one to take care of them here now and they would probably end up not being schooled (and growing up without a mother)…
fine, people die, but i just hate thinking about the ripple effect of such incompetence