July 17

                Back in the emergency room awaiting my blood test.  It is even busier than it was yesterday, and the staff are even more irritable. This time we didn’t know where my patient folder went. Everything here is done by paper still, not computer, so there is a lot of cuing and waiting. You cue to check in, cue to check your results and cue to check your blood pressure. When the nurse has a  big enough stack she carries them to the examination room and you cue again there.

                It turns out I do not have malaria, and the only other information the doctor would give me was high white blood cell count. When I pressed him further he used the term “blood infection” and then I was dismissed. Then we cued one more time to buy medication. For 25 cedi they gave me vitamin B supplements, antibiotics, and some strange horse pill that the clerk said were like tylonol. In fact, all the medications were pretty vague.

                While we waited in line to pay there was a man in front of me being very biligerent to the teller. He was yelling and slamming his hand on the window. The teller had to get up and lock the door. He was yelling in English but I couldn’t make out what the problem was. Once he left I made a joke to Nathan that he didn’t seem that sick if he could yell like that, and we both had a good chuckle. I told him you’d see behavior like that in traffic back home, but rarely ever in a hospital.