Hospital ‘humour’ of ultrasound scan and bottle of water

I should be forgiven for adding humour into misery at the hospital but again, humour is my specialty and it is everywhere even in death.

Once upon a time, a friend ran a newspaper column called “Laughing to stop crying”. Maybe this is what I am doing – I am laughing it off to forget the ordeals that patients go through in public hospitals – especially when it comes to imaging equipment.

I arrive at Muhimbili by 5:00 am to beat the queue. There are other patients already queuing, some in very critical conditions – I inwardly wonder if they permanently pitched tent at the hospital compound but keep my journalist mouth that never stops shooting questions shut.

I also need to be early because getting a free wheelchair if one is late is virtually impossible. I do this because my patient is well over 100 kg and shifting him from the scan room to the consultation room to the lab and other places, some in the end of hospital is like single-handedly pushing loaded truck.

Even the mere act of pulling him out of the taxi, some prisoners in the company of prison warders lend a hand (prisoners are good people too). Sitting him on the wheelchair, I know for sure that real work of wheeling him around the hospital precincts just started in earnest.

My father-in-law needs to have an abdomen ultrasound scan and a Doppler scan on his swollen legs. Before this, ultrasound, CT-Scan, Doppler scan, MRI scan and God-knows-what other scans were vocabularies to me. I thought those screens are on only found on Mars. Now, they have become part of my diction.

Queues begin. First, I have to get the patient recorded (and get a number). The rest is waiting and waiting for eons. I remember that both I and the patient have not had breakfast and it is already 10   o’clock. I have to leave him in the queue and dash to the hospital canteen to eat something and bring him a morsel too.

I also have to take a puff which one cannot do within the hospital compound. That accomplished, I return and continue waiting. Just when I start feeling restless, and my old man is dozing, we are called.

The next station is the ultrasound scan room but judging from the number of the people waiting, I can tell that I might take the whole day there. One of the assistants tells us that the for the ultrasound to work, the patient should drink lots of water – the bladder has to be full.

I comply by dashing off to the canteen and come back blandishing a 1½ which my patient seeps patiently. We exchange chit-chats as we wait on. He is draining the bottle.

Work starts in earnest but priority is given to babies and therefore, one has to keep waiting. But as if the waiting is not irksome enough, patients brought in stretchers from the wards are ferried in. I realize that although my patient is sick, his condition is better than that of those patients and he wait some more.

It is noon and my patient is becoming fidgety – he wants to empty his bladder. That, I cannot deny him. I therefore wheel him to the loo and support him to stand. We are hardly five minutes back from the washroom when his name is called. He has already emptied his bladder and I dash back for another bottle of water.

This back-and-forth process repeats itself but we are finally in the scan room and mzee is scanned. I am angry at the slowness of the process and ask the young man operating the scan why the processes are too slow.

I can see he is clearly exasperated and even tired. He explains that there are few scan machines and one had to be taken to the ICU to support there. I understand him because from the look on his face, he has done his best but the imaging machines are overstretched. Something must be done about it