Let's Go to the Hospital!

African hospitals are the one thing that's quite similar to the way I envisioned it before coming to Africa. Without generalizing too much, they are typically crowded, chaotic, dirty, and fascinating.

Last week Ina and I went to Kitale District hospital, partly to find out what happened to a burn victim we visited 2 years ago, and partly to wander around and meet people. (Forget any HIPAA laws around here!)

When we entered the parking lot, an old woman and her daughter, with presumably her daughter tied to her back, ran up to me. The old woman was wailing and holding her wrist while her daughter waved a fee slip and yelled something frantically in Swahili. After a few questions, I discovered the old woman couldn't be treated until she paid the 30 shilling admittance fee (roughly 40 cents). She unwrapped her arm and showed me her wrist, which flopped awkwardly away from her body, clearly broken. Ina can tell you I'm staunchly anti-handouts, but all I could think of right then was "40 bloody cents, Andrea." I handed her two 20-shilling pieces and she wailed her thanks and ran back to the counter to be admitted.

Ordeal #1 complete. And we hadn't even entered the hospital yet.


To cut a long morning short, we spent some time with the nurses in the burn unit, which was also being used for a bit of everything else. There were kids with chicken pox, a boy with the entire left side of his body swollen to twice the normal size, and woman with a huge bloody gauze strip over her eye. A man in a wheelchair with a covered hand was pushed by, wailing, and leaving a trail of blood spots behind him. We talked with a nurse as she 'disinfected' (she touched so many things with her 'sterile' gloves, I lost count) an older woman's leg amputation wound. The majority of her leg had been removed a few years earlier due to diabetes complications, but became infected recently and was so badly enflamed and reopened, you could see the bone inside.

The best part of the day was walking into the infant ward and finding a little bundle on a bed in the back room.



She was brought to the hospital the day before by an area chief, after being found abandoned outside the local prison. She was clearly premature but in perfect condition apart from bug bites on her left arm. I have never seen such an incredibly small but perfectly formed little body.

We went back to visit the next day, and talked to a nurse about her. The only way she could be discharged was if she weighed more than 3kg, and she currently weighed 1. Ironically, the nurse admitted to us, she was much more likely to gain weight in a baby or foster home than in the dirty hospital, being exposed to God knows how many diseases, and fed and changed whenever the overworked nurses happened to have a minute.

On my way to the hospital the 3rd day, I got a text from my friend Mere, saying the baby had just been taken by their friends Jeff and Carla, who run a large and thriving baby home outside town. They'd stopped by to see her and the nurse had told them just to take her, even though she was technically 2kg underweight. So the informality of it all has its pluses..

We are headed back to the hospital tomorrow to pick up malaria meds for a friend. More on that later.