Getting Ill
The week I got ill, I had started work traveling around to the different towns to meet with people and discuss my PhD project with them. After two days, which were exhausting and somewhat frustrating for various reasons, I decided we needed to reassess the methodology and timeline a bit to find a way of working within my institutional requirements while still carrying out a reasonable research project given the circumstances of being in rural Ghana, not on a university campus where those requirements were designed to be carried out. That is a separate rant for a separate audience so I will spare you the details here and will work on finding a constructive way of addressing some of those issues in the future.
So, we stopped work after visiting only three towns and made plans to spend day three in Logba Alakpeti reviewing the past two days and coming up with a more appropriate system.
That night I got ill. My body was aching, my stomach was cramped, and I did not feel good. All night tossing and turning. In the morning I spoke with the nurse who lives in our compound, then I called the university's travel insurance company, as I had been instructed to do upon getting ill. The office in Accra said they couldn't help me directly but referred me to the headquarters in France. I called them and they were very helpful and had me speak to their in-office doctor who said my symptoms could be malaria or could be many other things but that I needed to be seen by a doctor in person to be sure. I said fine. They then called around to their contacts in Ghana to find out where I should go.
The nearest city is Hohoe, which is the district capital and is about an hour or so away by trotro. There's a hospital there. There's also a hospital in Kpando, which is just about as close as Hohoe. Slightly further away and in the opposite direction from Hohoe is the regional capital, Ho. Accra, Ghana's capital, is approximately four hours away by trotro.
I've been struggling to describe what happened next because it's simultaneously horrible and hilarious. Somehow, the person in the travel insurance office decided that the Catholic Hospital in Ho, which their office had once checked out (back in 2007), was the place for me to go. He had called their administrator who spoke to him professionally and seemed confident that their facilities were in good condition. In contrast, when he tried to call the hospital in Kpando, nobody answered at all.
Go to the Catholic Hospital, then! But go tomorrow, because the administrator says there is bad traffic.
Okay, fine. I'm not seriously ill, I just 'might be' seriously ill. I can wait until tomorrow morning.
In the meantime, I asked my family how far it was to Ho. "Oh about one and a half hours."
Okay, and how far is it to Kpando? "Oh, about one hour or one and a half hours."
So, if it's roughly the same amount of time, and the insurance company recommends I go to Ho, I guess I better go to Ho.
My homestay dad, then told me shortly afterwards, "I hear from a reliable source that there is no Catholic Hospital in Ho. But there is a Catholic Hospital in Kpando. Are you sure of where you are going?"
Well, I’m ill and feel horrible, so no I’m not sure, but okay, I'll call again and make sure.
I called the office in France. They told me again, "No, we couldn't reach the hospital in Kpando. The Catholic Hospital in Ho answered the phone. Here is their phone number and their address." The address was, "Battor High Road."
Is that a suburb of Ho? How can I know...
But I called the Catholic Hospital and asked where they were. They said they were definitely not in Kpando, and proceeded to give me driving directions from Hohoe. I was feeling a bit confused, because I really don't know the roads here very well (I've never driven them and had passed through them only three times in my life as a somewhat oblivious passenger), but two of the towns he mentioned we could go through were towns I know roughly, having stayed in one of them during my travels here four years ago. From my memory, they are not really directly on the way between here and Ho.
But what do I know?
Trotro to Ho
I slept really well that night, for the first time in several days, and was feeling considerably better, except I wanted to keep sleeping when my family came and woke me up at around 6am so I could get ready to leave for the clinic.
I feel better! I want to stay in bed!
No no, you must be seen by a doctor because malaria can be dormant and you can feel fine, then it will get worse again. And everybody has already made arrangements. Vivian will travel with you.
Okay, fine. It's for the best that I be seen, just to rule out anything really scary.
So, I got ready and we went. By 7:20 am we were standing on the main road waiting for a trotro to Ho.
A car comes. "Ho?" Vivian asks. "Yes, yes get in!" the mate replies.
Turns out the car was going to Kpeve, which is on the way to Ho, but not quite Ho. Vivian told him off, and the other passengers made some comments about how important it is to be honest with your passengers, but we were already aboard so we went along anyway.
From Kpeve we got another trotro to Ho and arrived around 10 am or so. We called the hospital to find out where we should go via taxi. The helpful administrator said, "Okay, now go to Sogakope." Sogakope is a city...it's a city I stayed in for a few days with my other classmates learning about pottery making. It is near the coast. It is on the way to Togo. It is not near Ho.
I asked Vivian, "How far is it to Sogakope?"
"Oh, don't worry. It is not far. We can take a trotro there."
So, we got on a trotro to Sogakope, which we sat in for an hour or so waiting for it to fill with passengers before we could depart (Cephas informs me that some time ago Ghana tried a transportation system which operated on a set schedule and if you bought your ticket you could go home and rest until it was time to depart, but that quickly fell apart and now you just wait until there are enough passengers to fill the vehicle).
At last we left, and traveled along a graded but not paved road (aka full of huge potholes like nearly every road here - 'rainy season' doesn't seem to be one of the variables accounted for in road engineering designs yet) for an hour or two until we finally arrived in Sogakope. We got a cab and said, "Please take us to the Catholic Hospital." We got there and called the administrator and he said, "That is not the correct one. You must travel to Sege."
Okay, that seems odd. But, we paid the cab to take us back to where we started and he put us on a trotro going to Sege, wherever that is. The trotro called out, "Accra cra cra cra" as its final destination. Also odd. I said to Vivian I felt like maybe we were wasting our time. She said, trying to be comforting and supportive of our mission, "Oh, don't worry! We have come here to go to this place, we will go there. Feel free!"
Next time I will feel free to stay in bed.
In Sege, an hour or so later, we alighted and again called the administrator. He told us to take a trotro from there to Battor and to ask to alight at the Catholic Hospital.
Turns out Battor is not a suburb of Ho.
So, we got a trotro to Battor, alighted at the hospital, and a full seven hours after we'd left that morning, finally arrived at the correct place.
Let me say again: it takes four hours to get to Accra (which would have been an international travel insurance company's dream location for one of their clients to be treated!). We went from Logba to Kpeve, Kpeve to Ho, Ho to Sogakope, Sogakope to Sege, and Sege to Battor and it took seven hours. If you have a faster internet connection, feel free to follow along on the map!
As was also pointed out to me, it takes less than seven hours by flight to reach Ghana from the United Kingdom. For some time afterwards, if we wanted to make anyone laugh we just said, "UK to Ghana, seven hours. Volta Region to Volta Region, seven hours! Haha!"
Arriving at the Hospital
When I walked in to the hospital and spoke to the administrator he said, "Welcome! You are late and we have already closed, but we will have you seen, don't worry." I wanted to cry.
I filled out paperwork. They drew blood and had me pee into a little glass bottle in a bathroom with no soap, toilet paper, or toilet seat (and definitely no little packet of hygienic wipes with illustrated instructions like hospitals in the States give you). They took my pulse and blood pressure and poked my stomach. The doctor checked me out and said, "Malaria," which is also what they say if you walk into a hospital and are foreign before they've even asked you your name.
I'd taken my malarone every day except possibly one (oops) and hadn't been bitten by a mosquito since I'd left Accra over two weeks previously (still haven't - there aren't any mosquitoes where I'm staying). While I was in Accra I used bugspray diligently and slept under my mosquito net every night. But, you know, it could still be malaria.
Then the doctor told me, "We are detaining you."
"What? I want to go home!"
"You can't go home. It is too late and the journey is too long. Part of your treatment is rest. You will stay here tonight. And you are dehydrated. You will have an IV."
Well, no kidding, I'm dehydrated. I've been riding on trotros all day in the hot African sun. My water bottle ran out hours ago.
I cried.
They drew blood two more times (those two hurt), took another little bottle of urine, and stuck an IV in me (which hurt the entire time I was there, and the area the needle was in is still bruised and tender a week and a half later). I was placed in a room with an older woman and hooked up to an IV fluid dripper (whatever the technical term is).
Through the whole thing, Vivian stayed with me, reassuring me and telling me everything would be okay, don't worry. She went and got me a bit of food from the street when the nurse said I had to eat something with my medication (four malaria treatment pills twice a day, and two nasty-tasting pain killers to be chewed, also twice a day) and she got me a gatorade-like drink to help with the rehydration, as well as a huge bottle of water. She got herself some food and also got us some basic supplies so we could take bucket baths in the morning, have toilet paper, and eat our food out of bowls instead of plastic bags. etc. Through all of this, I have to say she was amazing and I’m very grateful she was with me and have a huge amount of respect for her strength.
The woman in the room and I each had hospital beds with a sheet, but Vivian and the other woman's friend slept on the floor on thin mattresses the nurses brought. We had it pretty luxurious compared to most of the people in the hospital, with air conditioning and a TV and mosquito screens on the windows. In trying to keep my family and the travel insurance office updated about my whereabouts with some important contact details just in case they needed to reach me, my phone battery died. I hadn't brought my charger (Ho is only an hour and a half away, after all!), but in the morning we found someone who lent me one. So I spent the evening crying, having fluid dripped into my bloodstream through my hand, and watching badly dubbed Spanish soaps and Japanese wrestling.
And aside from the trauma of the journey and having a pretty limited appetite, healthwise I felt fine... Definitely an overkill to be lying on a hospital bed hooked to an IV.
I didn't sleep well. Vivian slept even worse because she had the full blast of the AC on her (I didn't even realize it was on until the morning when she asked me to turn it off - we had to ask the nurse for help figuring it out).
In the morning, Vivian got us some more food, we each had a bucket bath, and the nurses gave me my meds again. I asked if I could go home and was told to wait for my results from the doctors.
At around 10 am the doctors came and gave me my results: Negative for malaria!
"We still think you have malaria, so you must continue your treatment."
"Fine."
Negative for everything else! Except there was bacteria in my urine sample (no kidding?) which they interpreted to mean I had a UTI.
"Have you had pain on urination?"
"No."
"Increased frequency of urination?"
"No."
"We think you have a UTI."
"No, I don't."
"We're giving you antibiotics."
"Thank you, and I hear you, but I won't take them."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't have a UTI, and I don't want to take antibiotics unless it's absolutely necessary."
"Is it just you who feels this way?"
"I want to go home!"
"Okay. We will be discharging you."
Hurray! Immediately my spirits soared, my overall health jumped 100% and I felt so so happy. I can go home!
We then waited another several hours for them to get the bill prepared and finally (finally!!) they released me.
The Journey Home
I would love to write about the beauty of the journey, how I learned so many new things and saw such incredible and beautiful landscapes and wildlife, because that was a part of it. But what stands out to me isn't the weasel-creature that ran across the road (I'm told it was a squirrel, but as my dad says, "Squirrels are just rats in cute suits."), the three white cranes flying overhead, the rice paddies and mango groves, the herds of long-horned cattle walking past, or the boulder-strewn mountain with massive trees growing up to the sky. It was the fact that I was totally and utterly worn out emotionally and physically and then spent another seven hours traveling by trotro to get home well after dark. (If you're following along on the map, this time the journey was more direct and went from Battor to Kpong, Kpong to Logba, with another long stopover waiting for the trotro to fill in Kpong.)
Everyone welcomed us, but my homestay dad, though I'm sure he was well-meaning, made a comment to the effect of, "I told you there was no Catholic Hospital in Ho," which I can finally find funny. The next day I called the hospital administrator to thank him for his help, when what I really wanted to do was ask why he never bothered to mention to me or to the insurance people that he was not actually located in Ho (I'm fairly certain the answer will be, "Well you didn't ask that exact question!"). I also called the insurance team to thank them and to politely inform them that Battor is not in Ho and that it would have been much faster for me to go to Accra. (Next time, of course, I'm not going to call them at all, I'm just going to go to Kpando or Hohoe.) They politely updated the record.
So, I am home now and safe. I've taken time to just rest, and tomorrow I'm starting my work again. I've found this a challenging story to write (and even rewrite), as it's hard to convey how the tiny little things that keep one sane and feeling safe and supported just don't exist here in the ways that I'm used to. And how do I explain that having stomach cramps and body aches in West Africa could either mean you have a life threatening disease or could mean you were sleep deprived and stressed, but otherwise fine? And that not knowing and not being able to ask the right questions or get the right answers means you can take a trotro to Ho and end up ‘detained’ in a place called Battor, seven hours from home and what feels like forever away from your loved ones.
I take responsibility for my own naivety, and I'm extremely grateful that I was always in strong and caring hands (thank you, Vivian, and the rest of my homestay family!), and the people I spoke with in the insurance office were geniunely concerned about ensuring my well-being was cared for to the highest of standards (Kpando and Hohoe just didn't happen to be in their system and Ghana's geography was unfamiliar to them). It has been a learning experience.
So, thank you everyone for your ongoing support and little messages of encouragement or stories from your own adventures. It's always nice to hear from you. Stay tuned for "Things You Can Buy From A TroTro Window." And here is a photo of a kitten named Lucky, who joined our family one day, tied up in a sack (!), but has now gotten its strength up and befriended me enough to be willing to trade snuggles for some photos.
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| Lucky, the kitten |
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