Medical Emergency

(photos pending reliable internet)
The waiting spaces of Clinic Days at the Baptist Medical Centre are dark, hot and loud. People begin cramming into benches at 6am; by 6:30 when the lorries arrive carrying the sick and their relatives, the benches are filled, and the floor is running out of space. People go through the check-in process with any number of ailments, from the minor to the dire—and often the more serious it is, the farther away they have come from. Most rural communities lack orthodox health facilities of any kind, but the majority have herbalists, traditional healers and birth attendants who can deliver babies and effectively treat malaria, some snake bites, fevers, and even minor cholera without leaving the community. Those who must leave have almost invariably been treated insufficiently or inappropriately, and are weaker, sicker, and in more danger than they were before. The doctors of the BMC tell me of the “fracture specialists” that treat in many communities, including Nalerigu, by twisting, turning and massaging of the broken limb. For every time this method is successful, they say, they have to perform two amputations of gangrenous, poisonous, deadwood limbs. The rainy season tends to complicate things; severe cases of malaria, pneumonia, typhoid and cholera become a daily challenge at the hospital, and fractures, black cobra bites, and accidents become commonplace as people work their farms.

Wards are filled with the smells of sanitation fighting the odours of road dust and human sweat, as the relatives and friends of those admitted visit daily, regardless of the distance traveled to do so. There is no fee to visit, but the meals, bed, care, blood transfusions, consultations and medications come at a price. A bad bout of malaria in one member can cause a family incredible stress—it becomes the choice between risking the loss of a family member, and risking the whole family's starvation after food is sold to pay medical bills. Nevertheless, the line at the pharmacists' counter never seems to thin. In Ghana, there is a medicine for everything, parceled out in old collection envelopes from American Baptist churches.

The small sun shelter of the Nutrition Centre is always bursting with mothers cradling children suffering from “kwashiorkor”, the grotesquely bloated stomach and frail body of television famine victims severely malnourished during their most crucial developmental years. Healthier children, wrapped in a sea of IV tubes and watching Ghanaian children's television with broad smiles on their TZ-coated faces, are often there too. It is the worst now, during the rainy season—it has been a whole year since the last harvest and the flood that destroyed farms and homes, and under normal conditions some of the villages that send their sick to the BMC may not have had a stable food supply in 9 months, forget a supply that is nutritionally balanced. Despite this, the Nutrition Centre is one of the more pleasant, relaxed sections of the hospital. It is one of the few places that deliver much-needed medical assistance that is relatively risk-free.

Despite the lateness of the day, and the line of almost 300 before me, I am ushered to the front, given immediate consultation, blood smears and tests, and sat to wait as my relatively minor case is rushed to the forefront. I ask the American and Swedish doctors serving me to place me at the end of the line—and am answered with ominous honesty that there is no “end of the line”. Those sweating and suffering around me for hours before I even entered the grounds do not so much as raise an eyebrow in indignation.
White privilege strikes again; I am heart-heavy for the rest of the day.