Buy one get one free: the not-so-Safeway version

---

Well, after a month of weighing babies and vaccinating pregnant women, finally being on the other end of the needle, and getting to know the whole staff of the Department of Disease Control, I am ready to move on to the ward for some new experiences and skills. I was supposed to get my orientation on Monday but as it turned out, I met the medical ward a few days early, as a patient... again. A sudden bout of food poisoning hit me hard Saturday morning (for the first time since 2005!) just before I was getting ready to go to the beach for a swim. My highly religious colleague/new Ghanaian mother, Felicia, (who doesn’t really understand I already have a Ghanaian family) said it was God’s way of preventing me from drowning in the sea-- because that’s what would’ve happened if I hadn’t been violently ill. I’ve been staying at her sister’s place in Teshie, eating lavishly at her house (her husband is a doctor) and carpooling to work. She took me straight there, where her poor little children had to empty and wash my barf bucket, and forced me to drink charcoal, which I hadn’t had to endure since I OD-ed on Flintstones vitamins when I was three.

Eventually I got so weak and dehydrated that we went to the hospital where we work. Some of the nurses and doctors who know me were on duty but instead of greeting me with sympathy most of them yelled at me for not eating more carefully! Of course, it wasn’t Felicia’s fault because she and her M.D. husband are anally hygienic, so the scapegoat became the Chinese Ghanaian woman who makes and sells soy milk at the hospital. It usually gives me no problems but I didn’t drink it until the afternoon on Friday because we were overloaded with 295 babies at the clinic and “China Woman” couldn’t get through to provide us with breakfast. Hopefully my experience won’t affect her business, but already a few of the staff that learned of its possible toxicity vowed to stop buying it. The rumor soon spread and I could hear everyone asking about me, the story being told over and over. My fluency in Twi is vastly improving but when they get going really fast and I tune out, sometimes all I can understand are the few English words. In this case it sounded like: “Blah blah blah CHINA WOMAN koraaaa... blah blah blah OBRUNI ntemtem.. blah blah WON’T DRINK AGAIN”.

My second ER detainment was fortunately a lot faster and much more pleasant than the last. My support network was already built in because I am now part of the hospital community. Felicia and my friend Mabel immediately started me on a drip and took me to the Doctors’ Quarters, where I spent the afternoon listening in on patient exams (no confidentiality laws here!) and swatting away mosquitos that were swarming my gurney. I started feeling better, at least on the projectile expulsion front, but spiked a fever in the evening. The doctor then suspected malaria and chuckled:

“Yeah, you know, that’s our special offer; you come in with food poisoning and leave with malaria. It’s like, buy one get one free!”

[But actually, it’s kind of not funny. We’re not talking about saving $1.50 on ice cream. Malaria is not cheap to take care of and those who can’t afford it often suffer fatally. It’s one thing for a hospital to not have power all the time, but they should definitely make it more mosquito-proof]

Since I refused to stay the night and there were no available beds anyway, Felicia brought the injections I needed home to administer herself. The family of six gathered around in the living room-- apparently watching an obruni receive shots in the buttocks is a rare and amusing event. Luckily, Felicia is an award-winning injector and I didn’t even scream. Fatigued and drugged, I went back to my bed to fall gratefully fast asleep.

Tomorrow before joining the nursing team, I’ll go for a blood test (the lab is closed on weekends!) to check my parasite level. Besides dodging fate and not getting swept to sea, I think the purpose of getting sick again after only a month of wellness was to help me understand the degree to which disease is such an interfering fact of life here, and probably in a lot of the world, which is giving me more and more motivation to help improve the problematic factors.

This Thursday I might get the opportunity to make a small difference. It’s National Polio Prevention Week, so a team of hundreds of health professionals and volunteers are going door-to-door to each district, slum and school to distribute boosters, vitamins, de-wormers, nutritional and hygiene advice. I’m hoping to prove to them that I am strong enough to participate!

---