A Very Special Episode

When we arrive at Ngaoundere Regional Hospital, it’s dark outside, but I’m not sure of the exact time. The Peace Corps driver who brought me here, Bouba, asks me if he should wait in the car or come inside with me.

“If you don’t mind,” I say in French, “I’d like you to come with me. I don’t really know how this process works.”

He nods and gets out of the car, so I do as well, gingerly, and using only my right arm to hoist myself out of the white SUV.

“Can you walk?” Bouba asks.

“Yes,” I say, though the entire left side of my body aches and a flinch a little with every other step I take.

So Bouba walks and I hobble into the Urgences, and to my great relief, there are only a handful of people waiting.

Perhaps because my case is more urgent, or perhaps because of the color of my skin, a male nurse and his female assistant identically dressed in white lab coats speak to me almost immediately, asking me about what happened.

I speak French rather well, but between fatigue and shock, words refuse to align themselves into sentences, so Bouba speaks for me. “A road accident. She was in a taxi when the driver lost control and hit a semi.”

I was in a Toyota Corolla going from Ngaoundere back to Nyambaka. There were eight people in the car—three in the front seat, and four adults and an infant in the back. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon, and I was only minutes away from my destination when it began to rain. The driver continued on, clearly exceeding the speed limit despite the curves in the road. Just as an oncoming semi approached, he lost control.

To my surprise (and, I’ll admit, disappointment), the nurse nods, but seems unphased. Working in the emergency room in a country where car accidents are one of the leading causes of death, he probably sees cases much worse than mine on a regular basis. Regardless, he ushers us into the adjacent examination room that looks like it hasn’t been updated since the ‘70s. Between the offensive fluorescent lighting, the bloody tissues visible in the wastepaper basket, and the slightly rusted tray of surgical tools on the counter, it feels somewhat like the setting of a low-budget horror film.

“Where do you hurt?” asks the male nurse.

“My left arm, the left side of my face… actually, most of the left side of my body,” I say. “But it’s mostly my arm I’m worried about.”

“Can you lift it?”

I lift my arm to about the level of my chest. He gently lifts my arm, despite the pitiful squeak of pain I let slip.

“It’s not broken,” he says. “If anything were broken, you wouldn’t be able to lift your arm.” He then lifts my left sleeve to reveal a smear of dried blood. “You said you had no injuries, just bruises,” he says, and I sense annoyance in his tone. I apologize, saying, “I didn’t even know.”

The nurse gives Bouba a list of supplies to buy at the pharmacy down the hall: cotton, rubbing alcohol, two syringes, and two kinds of painkillers. Unlike in the States, here one has to pay for treatments and medications beforehand.

The rest of the visit is without incident: I receive my injections and a week’s worth of painkillers, pay my bill, and am on my way.

“When’s the last time you ate?” asks Bouba as I watch a sizeable cockroach scuttle across our path.

“About eight hours ago,” I say. “Where do you want to go? After all that, I owe you dinner.”