This morning I went for a run in the snow. I ran along pavement lined
streets in to Battersea Park, then I came home, made myself a freshly ground
coffee and settled down for some personal admin on my ‘zero-day’ (compensatory
leave for working at the week-end). Life could not be much more different to a
year ago. If I went for a run last year, it was along the muddy banks of the
River Nile, in muggy heat, dodging piles of rubbish, followed by a gaggle of
naked giggling children. Work was a little different too. Not going in left me
racked with guilt, wandering what horrors my colleagues were facing on the
emergency medical ward at Juba Teaching Hospital. When I turned up for my
morning ward round I would pick my way between the patients laid out on the
floor, the crowds of expectant looking relatives, and quickly check who was
unconscious or expiring and would need seeing first. I would then gather together
any other doctors who had turned up, send one to beg some paper from the admin
office, one to find the only blood pressure cuff on the ward, one to buy some
‘urgent’ medicine for an unconscious patient over the road at the over-priced
pharmacy. By this point I would find the sweat running down my arms, look up to
see the electricity had cut out again and the fans had stopped, just at the
moment when someone would need to use the oxygen machine. Hmmm…
South Sudan was tough. I tend to make a pained face, when people ask, and say I’m glad I did it. But I wouldn’t do it again. I have tried to come up with fancy theories as to why I found it so hard but the bottom line is that I just couldn’t stomach the poverty, leading to disease and death that I came face to face with every day. I came back to England last summer parched to dryness, prone to emotional lability in inappropriate places, desperate to treat old people with UTIs again and complain about the NHS computer system.
It felt both wonderful and awful to be able to get on a plane and escape those daily horrors, leaving my colleagues to deal with them forever more. Yet as I predicted in my last blog, it was very easy to forget about the reality of South Sudan and slip back in to my ‘normal’ luxurious life. It is incredible to live in London - a city with pavements, and train stations with fancy screens and coffee shops and art galleries. It is astounding to work in the NHS where I can make people better, where there are drugs, and running water and gloves and nurses who are trained to do their job and do it bloody well. But even then I find myself feeling annoyed when a chest xray takes three hours, or a patient’s bedside lamp doesn’t work, or one of the many beeping machines is broken and beeps at me all night.
I had a surreal moment a couple of weeks back, when taking blood from a patient at 5am on the renal ward. I looked up and for a moment I was back at Juba Teaching Hospital. The patient was one of the Nuer tribe, a refugee who fled civil war in South Sudan as a teenager but not before he had undergone ritualistic scarification – linear scars crossed his forehead, giving the impression of surprise or age beyond his 34 years. The contrast between this setting and where I had treated his kinsman a year before was ridiculous. At St George’s Hospital this guy had a private room with a personal TV/radio/phone. He was receiving dialysis –life-saving treatment for end stage renal failure – a condition that I saw all too often in Juba and was sadly a death sentence of maybe 3 or 4 painful months. He was being prepared for a kidney transplant. He was on treatment for HIV. He was having daily blood tests that would interrogate every chemical level I could dream up and more.
Despite my obvious weakness for train announcements and functioning hospitals, I want to go on remembering the reality of the difficulties faced by people in the poorest parts of the world. My personal challenge is to go on responding to poverty, without being nauseated by it on a daily basis. This is why I am supporting a little charity set up by my parents along with two Ugandans they sponsored through university (Check out Nyamirembe School Development Trust). I met Kenneth and Bright in Uganda last year (see blog 6 ‘Lessons from Kampala’), and was completely humbled by their sense of privilege and thankfulness for the education they had received. They now have a vision to see education improved for the kids in their home village, starting with the Nyamirembe Secondary School. So far the charity has revamped the school library, providing written texts and secure storage space. Next it is looking to raise £10,000 towards pupil accommodation for students who walk more than 10km to school. I am contributing all money that I earn from locum shifts this year and doing a sponsored cycle with my dad and sisters in April from London to Oxford. It will be along the muddy banks of the River Thames but we hope not to be followed by any naked giggling children.
Please please join with me in supporting this project…
South Sudan was tough. I tend to make a pained face, when people ask, and say I’m glad I did it. But I wouldn’t do it again. I have tried to come up with fancy theories as to why I found it so hard but the bottom line is that I just couldn’t stomach the poverty, leading to disease and death that I came face to face with every day. I came back to England last summer parched to dryness, prone to emotional lability in inappropriate places, desperate to treat old people with UTIs again and complain about the NHS computer system.
It felt both wonderful and awful to be able to get on a plane and escape those daily horrors, leaving my colleagues to deal with them forever more. Yet as I predicted in my last blog, it was very easy to forget about the reality of South Sudan and slip back in to my ‘normal’ luxurious life. It is incredible to live in London - a city with pavements, and train stations with fancy screens and coffee shops and art galleries. It is astounding to work in the NHS where I can make people better, where there are drugs, and running water and gloves and nurses who are trained to do their job and do it bloody well. But even then I find myself feeling annoyed when a chest xray takes three hours, or a patient’s bedside lamp doesn’t work, or one of the many beeping machines is broken and beeps at me all night.
I had a surreal moment a couple of weeks back, when taking blood from a patient at 5am on the renal ward. I looked up and for a moment I was back at Juba Teaching Hospital. The patient was one of the Nuer tribe, a refugee who fled civil war in South Sudan as a teenager but not before he had undergone ritualistic scarification – linear scars crossed his forehead, giving the impression of surprise or age beyond his 34 years. The contrast between this setting and where I had treated his kinsman a year before was ridiculous. At St George’s Hospital this guy had a private room with a personal TV/radio/phone. He was receiving dialysis –life-saving treatment for end stage renal failure – a condition that I saw all too often in Juba and was sadly a death sentence of maybe 3 or 4 painful months. He was being prepared for a kidney transplant. He was on treatment for HIV. He was having daily blood tests that would interrogate every chemical level I could dream up and more.
Despite my obvious weakness for train announcements and functioning hospitals, I want to go on remembering the reality of the difficulties faced by people in the poorest parts of the world. My personal challenge is to go on responding to poverty, without being nauseated by it on a daily basis. This is why I am supporting a little charity set up by my parents along with two Ugandans they sponsored through university (Check out Nyamirembe School Development Trust). I met Kenneth and Bright in Uganda last year (see blog 6 ‘Lessons from Kampala’), and was completely humbled by their sense of privilege and thankfulness for the education they had received. They now have a vision to see education improved for the kids in their home village, starting with the Nyamirembe Secondary School. So far the charity has revamped the school library, providing written texts and secure storage space. Next it is looking to raise £10,000 towards pupil accommodation for students who walk more than 10km to school. I am contributing all money that I earn from locum shifts this year and doing a sponsored cycle with my dad and sisters in April from London to Oxford. It will be along the muddy banks of the River Thames but we hope not to be followed by any naked giggling children.
Please please join with me in supporting this project…
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