Operation

This week, I have been mainly having a minor operation and recovering from it. This is not something I thought I would have to do in Nigeria.

I won’t go into the physiological details, but suffice to say, I was in a lot of pain and the doctor whom I went to see decided that I needed to have an emergency surgical procedure. He had been recommended to me by a colleague, and seemed like a really good doctor, so I have to say I was both relieved – that someone who knew what they were doing was going to take some action to put an end to the pain I was suffering – and terrified, that I was going to have to go under the knife, in a Nigerian hospital, alone (Simon is still away with work).

He offered me a general anaesthetic but, given no-one really knew where I was, and general anaesthetics aren’t 100% safe wherever you are, I opted for local. As I sat on a cold steel bench in a corridor, waiting to be taken up to theatre, I hurriedly texted Simon: “I need to have a small surgical procedure under local anaesthetic. I feel OK about it – he seems like a really good doctor. I’ll call you in a couple of hours. Don’t worry.”. Then, remembering that no-one knew where I was, I sent him another text: “Turning phone off now. In case you need to know, it’s Dr Ankama at Jowako Hospital, Jos Road.”. And I turned off my phone.

A nurse came to take me up to theatre. As the doctor himself remarked, when he came in a little later, “This isn’t like your hospitals, is it?”. I can’t explain why, but for some reason the room reminded me of medical rooms in concentration camps I’ve visited, or – is there a medical room in the museum on Ellis Island? That’s what came to mind, anyway. White tiled walls. A ceiling fan. An ornate analogue wall clock. Ceiling lights that I had to turn on myself, and a plastic classroom style chair to sit on while I waited for the doctor. Three old-fashioned looking hospital beds, like you see in war-time costume dramas. The one in the middle – which was to be mine – had leather-style covers in dark grey, and two pillows, both in off-white leather covers, with dark red stains on them. “No, it isn’t,” I laughed in response. “But it is clean though, right?” He assured me it was, and unfolded a large grey plastic sheet with which he covered the entire bed, including the blood-stained pillows.

First, he explained, he was going to give me an opiate injection – he said something about it helping to numb the pain. He injected it into the back of my hand and I quickly felt quite woozy: kind of like a general anaesthetic that doesn’t quite knock you out, I suppose.

The next twenty minutes (and I know how long it was, because I was watching the ornate wall clock) were filled with injections, incisions and stitches, all of which I could feel, many of which were excruciatingly painful. I screamed and cried in pain for most of it, leading the doctor to plead with me to let him put me under. I don’t know if it was the pain or the effects of the opiate, but for a while my hands felt tingly and started to spasm.

His mobile rang frequently (several times he answered it) and people seemed to keep coming in and out. At one point, a man – who I assume was a doctor, but I couldn’t see him because he was behind my head – came in to ask my doctor’s advice about a patient of his. I cried out so loudly while he was there, that he said “Doctor! Can’t you please give her something?!” “She’s refusing!!” he replied. Call me old fashioned, but I thought a local anaesthetic was supposed to numb the area so you couldn’t feel the scalpel going in.

Once it was done, and he’d cleaned me down, he asked me to get down from the bed. The bloody aftermath of the procedure was still sitting on the grey plastic sheet for me to see. We then walked down to his office, me clinging onto the walls because my head was still spinning from that injection, and he talked me through payment, medication I needed to take, etc, and that was that. I wobbled out to the car park where I’d asked the hire car to wait for me, and we drove home (via a Lebanese supermarket where I bought copious amounts of imported chocolate).

It was certainly one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, and there’s no doubt that, to someone who’s used to UK hospitals, the conditions were a little discomfiting. But nonetheless, I think he was a good doctor and – so far so good – he seems to have performed the procedure well. He said something to me when we first met: “Some of us choose not to take the opportunity to go to the UK or US: we prefer to stay here to try to make some small difference.” And I am so grateful that that is the case. No matter how hard you work to protect yourself and to ensure that you have as little contact with hospitals out here as you can, sometimes emergencies happen and you need a first rate doctor there and then, regardless of what kind of an operating theatre he has available to him.