Life in the Ring of Fire Part 31: Adding Insult to Injury

Monday proved to be one of the most hectic days I'd had in Vanuatu since arrival. I was just finishing up my class for the day, holding back a few students still struggling with the concept of multiplication for some extra practice, when a couple of kids appeared at the classroom window and announced that I needed to come because there was someone in the courtyard wanting to talk to me. Instinctively, I told them to wait. I'd become well acquainted with a really obnoxious tendency of my fellow teachers to send kids to summon me, during the middle of one of my classes, to come speak to them. I would quickly rush outside, trying to resolve whatever issue they wanted to discuss as quickly as possible so as not to disrupt class. “What is it?” I'd ask.
“Sorry. Not much. What are you doing?”
“I”m trying to teach my freaking class! What in God's name do you want?!”
“Sorry to disturb you.”
“Yes, that's fine, now get to the point so I can go back and teach!”
“Sorry. Well, it's no big deal. I've just got this paper I need to photocopy to send home with the kids today.”
“OK.”
Long pause.
“Sorry, but the photocopier in the office is out of ink.”
“Yes, I know. Maybe if you bought some more you wouldn't have these problems.”
Long pause.
“Sorry, but I have a lot of work to do today. I don't know if I have time to go to Lakatoro to make copies.”
“Far out. I'm going to go back to my class now.” At this point I usually turn around and start to leave.
“Sorry.....”
“Yes?”
Long Pause.
“Sorry. What are you doing this afternoon?”
“What I usually do: nothing.”
Long Pause.
“Sorry. Um. If you have time. Sorry. What if I give you some money and um...”
“What?”
“Sorry. If you have time. You could, sorry, go to Lakatoro to make copies.”
“Yes, I could.”
“Sorry. I'll buy you kava tonight.”
“But you always buy me kava.”
Long Pause.
“So...” I'd say, finally deciding to have mercy, “you want me to go to Lakatoro to make copies for you, yes?”
“Yes! Please. If you have time. If not, sorry, maybe, maybe I can just not teach my afternoon classes and go to Lakatoro instead.”
Rolling my eyes, “yes, I can go make photocopies for you. Can I go teach now?”
“Oh Thank You So Much! I'll buy you plenty kava tonight!”
“Yeah, I don't want kava, I want you to man up and get to the point once in a while. No wonder it takes you six months to buy copier toner.”

Except I usually say that last bit to myself as I walk back to my class. We Peace Corps volunteers are supposed to be culturally sensitive, after all. Of course, it doesn't really take me until the end of the conversation to piece together the fact that they want me to go to Lakatoro to make copies, but I'm trying to teach assertiveness here. Also, I find it sort of amusing to play dumb and see how things pan out (yes, it's kind of mean, but don't knock it until you've tried it). At any rate, at this point five or so minutes would have passed, and my class would have lapsed into drawing unnecessarily detailed borders in their work books and it would take a few more minutes to bring them back to task. Hence, I'd started to adopt a policy of telling my colleagues that they'd just have to wait until after my class was over to talk to me. Granted, this generally only works for a few minutes before they show up at my window and put on such a show making “psst” noises and gesticulating wildly that it becomes impossible to ignore them. Still, it's a work in progress.

So anyway, when the kids showed up at my window and said someone wanted to talk to me, I naturally assumed that another obnoxiously slow conversation with a fellow teacher was about to ensue. After a few minutes, however, instead of a teacher showing up to gesture and “psst” at me from the door, a larger group of kids appeared in the window. “McKenzie!” They said “McKenzie's here!” This, I decided, was worth investigating. I walked out of class and, indeed, a truck was parked in the courtyard with McKenzie sitting in the front seat. I gave her a palms-up shrug (the Vanuatu signal for “What's up?”) and she waved me over to the truck. I peered in the window and saw that her day did not seem to be off to a good start. She was drenched in sweat and tears; her face flushed and twisted into a mask of agony. She looked like she was about to pass out. “Jesus. What happened?” I asked. “I need you to come to the hospital with me,” she said in a whimper and with an accompanying look which suggested that failure to comply would result in us never speaking again. I jumped in the back of the truck and we were off.

When we arrived at the hospital, I helped her out of the truck and repeated my question. “What happened,” I asked. “I dislocated my shoulder,” she whimpered in response. Our previous experience with the Norsup hospital when we'd taken Elin there to deal with her eye did not inspire a lot of confidence, and I had been trained to reduce dislocations as part of training for an outdoor program I'd been in college, so I briefly considered sitting her down at the hospital entrance to deal with the problem myself, but I decided that it really wasn't my place to be overruling an actual doctor, should one be present, and, since we were already at the hospital, it was probably worth it to go inside to see if there was any actual medical personnel that could help us. We were met at the emergency room by a white man wearing a white doctor's coat, which instantly got my hopes up as, not to be racist, but being white in Vanuatu usually means you've had a western education and, say what you will about the various problems with western medicine, believe me, it's what you want when you're really sick or injured. My optimism was somewhat tempered, however, when it was discovered that he spoke French and only halting English and Bislama, that he had a permanently bewildered expression on his face, and that it still took them a good ten minutes of shuffling around to get McKenzie into an examining room and start asking questions. After some initial problems with communicating through the language barrier, it eventually became clear that the doctor understood that her shoulder had been dislocated and that he intended to give her morphine and Valium injections to relax the muscles and reduce the pain and then attempt to replace the shoulder. This seemed like a reasonable enough treatment to me, and so I finally left the room after being repeatedly asked to do so by the doctor more or less since we'd arrived.

I took a seat on the concrete curb outside the hospital and tried, fairly unsuccessfully, not to listen to McKenzie's muffled yelps and screams coming from the examining room. After a few minutes of this, I decided to distract myself by calling in to our Peace Corps medical officer to advise them of the unfolding situation. Apparently taking a page from the playbook of American hospitals, there is no cell reception inside Norsup hospital (in the States, at least, this is supposedly because cell phones can somehow mess up certain types of medical equipment. I'm very skeptical of this claim, even in the US, whose hospitals contain many fancy medical machines whose inner workings I am, admittedly, ignorant of, but especially in Vanuatu, where the majority of hospital equipment consists of gauze and asprin, both of which, I'm almost positive, are uneffected by the proximity of cell phones. On a related note, I'm also skeptical of claims that cell phones and other electronics distrupt aircraft navigation systems, a claim that I've put to the test numerous times by underhandedly turning my cell phone on during a flight while the flight attendents aren't looking and seeing if the plane crashes or not. So far, my phone has yet to cause an aviation disaster although, unfortunately, it is true that you get very poor reception at 30,000 feet), meaning that I had to walk out to the road in order to place the call. Talking to Jane, our medical officer, is always a positive experience. Her soothing Australian accent combines well with her straight-to-business, no-nonsesne attitude to both put you at ease and assure you that the situation is in good hands. I filled her on on what was going on and she suggested that I try and get the Norsup hospital staff to perform and X-ray before reducing McKenzie's shoulder. I told her that, unless she could advise me on some way of rigging up an X-ray machine using only banana leaves and bamboo, this was unlikely to happen. Thus it was decided that we allow the beliwdered-looking French quasi-doctor to attempt to replace the shoulder.

I returned to my spot outside the hospital and noted that 1)McKenzie was still inside with the doctor and 2)she still seemed to be in a lot of pain. I started to get a little worried that the procedure was being botched as I was fairly certain that this sort of thing should really only take about five minutes, and McKenzie was going on about a half hour in the exam room. I thought about going in and asking them to stop and giving Jane another call, but just then a few nurses entered the room with a rolling bed and a sling, indicating to me that they were intending on moving her to a recovery room. This did, indeed, happen about ten minutes later and, after the nurses had left, I took a seat next to McKenzie in the recovery room. "What the hell did they do to you?" I asked, noting that she looked significantly worse than when we'd arrived at the hospital. She explained that, consistent with his bewildered expression, the French doctor was, in fact, incompetent, as evidenced by the fact that it had taken him a good fifteen minutes just to get an IV put in, a good 15-20 attempts at fiddling with her arm before getting her shoulder to go back in, and the pain had failed to subside significantly. Now, this is generally a very bad sign, as the more the injury is messed with, the more inflamed it gets, which both makes it less likely to get set properly when it does go back in and increases the chances that some additional damage has been done. I called Jane with another update, who told me to give it an hour or so to see if things got any better before making arrangements to get McKenzie to the airport and on a flight to Port Vila.

***OK, so there actually is more to this story, but the end got cut off somehow. Sorry to leave you all in suspense. Here's the gripping conclusion***

When the hour was up and things hadn't improved considerably, McKenzie and I left the hospital and boarded a truck to the airport. Now, Norsup hospital is north of both Tautu and the airport, meaning that you have to go to Tautu first and then catch the road down to the airport. The road connecting Tautu to the airport, however, isn't so much a road as a boulder field, with large irregularly shaped rocks protruding all about. This makes for a fairly painful truck ride, even if you're not injured, so I can't really imagine how much McKenzie wanted to kill me for making her leave the peaceful, stationary, environment of the hospital and embark on a bouncing, careening journey southward with her still considerable shoulder pain.

When we arrived at the airport, we were informed that the plane McKenzie was supposed to take had already left. Jane told me over the phone that they were trying to convince Air Vanuatu to turn the flight around and pick her up, but I considered this strategy unlikely to work. We hung out at the airport for a good half hour while the Peace Corps office was arguing with the airline before they decided to throw in the towel and charter a flight up. The charter plane arrived about an hour later and a friendly, competent-looking, Australian pilot (what can I say, there's something about that Australian accent that just makes you feel like everything's going to be OK) escorted McKenzie on the plane and they took off. I took a deep breath and meandered my way back to Tautu, glad to have the situation out of my hands.

When I got home, I told Duncan about the days adventures. I ended my story by telling him that I'd just put McKenzie on a plane to Vila and he, and demonstrating a Ni-Vanuatu talent for picking up on the most random and trivial details of a tale, sat silently for a moment and then asked: "Which flight did she take?" "Uh, Peace Corps chartered a plane," I explained. He considered this for a second and then said "Next time Peace Corps charters a flight to Vila, you call me so I can get a free flight in." "Uh, OK," I said, thinking this just a little insensitive. I changed my outlook, however, when he launched into a story of his own.
"Your brother, Frank, dislocated his shoulder once," he said.
"Really?" I asked.
"Yes, a coconut fell and hit him. It dislocated his shoulder and snapped his collar bone."
"Jesus!"
"It was a Friday and the doctor had already gone home, so we had to wait until Monday to take him to the hospital."
I had nothing to say to this. Although I doubted that this was Duncan's intention with telling the story, I felt guilty knowing that I could always fall back on Peace Corps to get me out of any serious medical situation, should the need ever arise, and considered what it would be like if Norsup hospital and the bumbling French doctor were all that I had.

Later that evening, I got a call from Jane informing me that McKenzie had seen a surgeon in Vila who had set her shoulder properly and concluded that no further damage had been done. She assured me that McKenzie would be just fine after a few days recovery time and would be back in Malekula in about a week.

Now, I'm sure some other stuff happened that week but, to be honest, nothing else particularly interesting comes to mind. I guess medical emergencies tend to overshadow other things just a bit. At any rate, I think that's quite enough material for a blog entry. Sorry to cut off the end and leave you all hanging before.