Last week a poor man was unfortunate enough to meet an irate elephant. The outcome is a crushed leg. The man’s leg of course…. at least he made it to the bush hospitable.
I flew a man with genital problems, quite obvious something was wrong on his parts. But weirdly he had been inconvenienced for 3 years and came to our mobile clinic and asked advice only because he vomiting blood! “Oh and by the way, doctor, could you also have a look at my balls?”. Usually men tend to delay visit to the doctor except when it comes to their precious genitals…then they couldn’t run faster.
One problem often encountered in the bush with Maasai people is that many will still go to the local charlatan for treatment. When it doesn’t work, they think there is still plenty of time to get treatment at the hospital. Well sometimes it is too late, the patient dies. And the conclusion tends to be that if the doctors couldn’t do anything, the local healer is not to blame either, and the story could repeat itself…
Some weeks ago a ferry capsized off the coast of Zanzibar. Rough estimates say 200 people died, the ferry was way overloaded with 800 passengers instead of 500 plus various cargo, worse some passengers even disembarked when they noticed the ferry was already listing even before leaving port but the crew thought they knew better... Survivors were found clinging on mattresses, fridges…anything that could float. What does this tragedy have to do with Flying Medical Service? Some nurses in one hospital we work with (we unfortunately don’t own or run it) decided to mourn the victims…for 3 days! And so for 3 days, there was no way to get them to work at all. I still fail to understand why mourning far away victims allows patients to die somewhere else for lack of care. You’d think this kind of employees should be fired and stripped of their right to work… nope.
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