Doctor doctor tell me the news, I’ve gotta bad case of loving you.
On this crazy World Race I’ve visited 5 countries. Unfortunately, I’ve visited the doctor in 4 of them. While I do hate being sick… I’ll never grow sick of telling the hilarity that ensues every time I visit a physician in a foreign land.
Once upon a Kenyan cold front, I caught a nasty chest cold. In fear I had, in actuality, contracted pneumonia my contact escorted me to the local physician.
Picture this: a doctors office straight out of 1963 with florescent orange lighting, sea foam green chairs, faded floral wall paper and posters on the wall praising abstinence and proper oral hygiene. Then, the doctor, who is older than the surrounding hill, enters stage left. He proudly escorts you to the examination room, adjacent to hanging laundry in a littered courtyard.
Now the scene is set. As you can gather, we’re in some rather “primitive conditions.”
Before he asked me my symptoms, he explained how blessed he feels to have Americans in his clinic. He pulls out a guest book and has everybody sign in. After much talk about, ” he land of opportunity,” he finally gets around to examining me as a patient.
After he acquired my symptoms which are simply, cough, congestion and headache, he picked up a cotton swab, brushed off a thermometer and told me to open my mouth. He took my temperature (via armpit) and determined my temp to be a balmy, 32.5 degrees. That’s about 91 Fahrenheit… Hypothermia. But, no worries to the good doctor.
He then decided that I needed to be tested for malaria. His lab tech walked in with gloves still soiled from the last patient and a needle that had visibly been used for other finger pricks. I was coughing up a lung and he wanted to test me for malaria!!! Luckily, Jesus, the ultimate physcian, always has my back and all the electricity at the doctors office mysteriously turned off.
The saga did not end with the lights. Approximately 15 minutes later he returned with a lantern and two large syringes in a basin. He proceeded to explain that in order to clear up my lungs he needed to inject a serum into my lungs, using one of the 4″ needles he had just produced from a nearby closet. As I’m not really looking to contract AIDS in Africa I once again fought the doctor from injecting me with a needle, this time by lantern light.
I left the office with no fee charged, HIV avoided, a fun new story to tell and a water bottle full of cough syrup. Just another wonderful day on the World Race and another adventurous trip to the doctor in the 3rd world. Yet another confirmation I need to go to graduate school.
