Well by Sarah Thebarge

Author:Sarah Thebarge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion / Christian Ministry / Missions, Biography & Autobiography / Medical, Biography & Autobiography / Religious, Medical / Terminal Care, Medical / Critical Care, Medical / Physician & Patient, Medical / Tropical Medicine
Publisher: FaithWords
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

AS THE SUN was rising the following morning, my snakebite patient’s latest bleeding time result came back, and it was normal, which meant that, with several rounds of antivenin, we had completely reversed the toxic effects of the snakebite, and he could go home.

After sign-outs, I was supposed to have the rest of the day off. But Laura was still very ill and the clinic was short-staffed, so Tanya asked if I would go to clinic and see some patients before returning to my room.

I had been awake for going on thirty hours and all I really wanted to do was go to bed. But I knew the numbers. If we had four providers in clinic, we could see a hundred people. Which meant that when a clinician was missing, there were twenty-five to thirty patients that Matt would have to turn away at the gate. So despite my fatigue, I agreed to go work in the clinic for the afternoon anyway.

I went to the bathroom and splashed cool water on my face to wake up, got a lukewarm cup of coffee from the dining hall, and walked over to the clinic, where Omari was waiting for me with a large stack of charts. Half of them listed “Tout les corps fait mal” as the Reason for Visit. The phrase meant “whole-body pain” or, literally, “all the body feels bad.”

I’d heard that phrase over and over again. It was one of the most common reasons patients came to the clinic. “Tout les corps fait mal.”

And it was no wonder that their whole bodies hurt, because most of them had spent their entire lives doing manual labor. The women carried heavy buckets of water and bundles of firewood on their head. They went through as many as a dozen pregnancies in their lifetime. Then, after the baby was born, they carried it on their back for two years.

The men hoed large fields with small, handheld tools that required them to be stooped over all day. They chopped firewood, mixed cement, and carried heavy loads of building materials.

The Togolese people who weren’t lucky enough to have a bicycle or a moped walked everywhere they needed to go. At night, they slept on the ground without a mattress or a pillow. They got malaria over and over and over again.

It would be a miracle if their bodies didn’t hurt after all that.

“Tout les corps fait mal” was a common complaint but a discouraging one, because the best I could do was to write them a prescription for ibuprofen for the pain and ask them to rest as much as they could. I couldn’t undo the effects of living in a developing country their whole lives. Eventually, the prescription would run out and those who lived far from the hospital would have to find a way to make the journey back to get a refill, or simply do without.

Omari called the first patient’s name. She was so stiff, she shuffled when she walked, and her upper body was tipped forward about twenty degrees.

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