The coastal region is known to wick your cold away with its incessant warmth and humidity. Watching the glass windows mist on the outside, I knew I had underestimated the cold that Monday evening. I was preparing to leave the house for a night shift at the hospital as I was the one on duty that week. It had been raining the better part of the afternoon. Fortunately, the rain had greatly reduced and since time grew nigh, I had to depart before another heavy downpour.
Creeping upon the walls of the gate, were paddles of water. It is no longer news that drainage is not so good along the Kenyan coast and therefore, a small downpour could cause great flooding. You can only imagine what inconvenience a whole afternoon of downpour had caused. Skipping through such paddles had almost made me a Simone Biles and eventually made it to the main tarmacked road. I boarded an almost overloaded matatu to hospital.
Approaching the final turn towards the hospital, a random police checkpoint emerged. Our quick-witted driver took a detour to town impressing his passengers. This was my first time working in the coast and I was not well familiarized with the area. I almost always took to a Google Map in such circumstances.
A deep bawl greeted me as I hastily approached the casualty pharmacy. In such a set-up, that could only mean one thing; passing. How worse could my evening… (which just go started) get? Shortly thereafter, my day-time colleague left.
The queues in public hospitals are interminable. In addition, alone, I needed to deal with the stern out-patient stares lingering at the dispensing windows, provide satisfactory customer care to new arrivals, withstand duress from family and guardians of patients who needed discharge forms filled and fill in-patient prescriptions. Not only were in-patient files streaming in from casualty wards, but also all 8 other wards that included the Intensive Care Unit. Night shifts were no joke!
This particular night felt different. Everything seemed to be going wrong. Three patients had already been declared dead on arrival. Two children had already succumbed even after hurriedly dispensing nebulizing masks. Moreover, the demise of two more patients in the casualty ward after failure of several efforts of resuscitation. The night was heavy of cries and wails from friends and family of the deceased.
In five years of pharmacy school, there was not a single day that any of my lecturers prepared me on how to overcome such emotional torture. I guess some things are better learnt through experience. Morning met the casualty pharmacy with piercing rays of sunlight. The coldness that reached into my bones now yielded. The only thing that remained was to keep moving towards the casualty exit and the steady warmth of the hearth.
Accompanying one of the deceased, was a somber mortuary attendant. This spark a thought in me, “While this patient came to the hospital alive and left dead, I left not only physically, but also emotionally alive from the lessons I had learnt throughout that night.’’ Each step became a prayer for home and health as I walked, while I gave the doorway my back, allowing the day become more real than the night it inherited.
By Dr. Klebsiella