Just One of Those Days...

Saturday 18th Feb. The day started off without any gas for cooking as our gas bottle had inexplicably run out - so no coffee!! Managed to get a new bottle later in the morning only to find that there was a gas leak behind the cooker which explains the early demise of the previous bottle.

Danielle took a turn for the worse (after having been ill for a couple of days) and went to see another doctor only to be told that the doctor she saw two days ago in the same clinic had clearly missed her swollen liver and so this doctor sent her home on bed rest - but without a malaria test. The pain in her liver got progressively worse and her fever rose to 102.5 and she had classic malaria chills interspersed with periods of heavy sweating. I did some research and found out that malaria can indeed attack the liver.

By that time the private clinic she had attended was closed so I took her (along with Ryan) to the public Trust Hospital in Osu. Not to put too fine a point on it; it wasn't the kind of place you wanted to linger, but of course linger we did. To cut the story short, another blood test and two doctor consultations later she was given a likely diagnosis of malaria which had been missed by the previous two doctors.

I went back to the cashier's desk for a third time, this time to pay for the malaria medicine and when I left I noticed a sweet little girl sitting all alone waiting to see the doctor. When I got home I saw to my horror that along with all my paperwork I had inadvertently picked up a cash receipt showing a payment of 60,000 cedis (around $6.00) and a hospital ID card for a Catherine Dartey born 17-06-96; undoubtedly belonging to the little girl I had seen waiting forlornly to see the doctor.



Maybe without her ID card and proof that she had paid she wasn't able to see the doctor - I have no way of knowing. I also had no way to get back to the hospital to return the receipt and ID card so was about to turn in with a heavy heart when I noticed that I had lost a $100 bill! With all of the countless local currency bills I was carrying (you walk away from a cash machine here with your pockets bulging with notes) I must have dropped that one small but vastly more valuable one while I was standing at the cashier's desk.

I am going to bed tonight with one hope. That in a final twist of fate, it would be Catherine Dartey who found the $100 bill which she would have used to pay again to see the doctor and then have $94 left over to buy something special for herself.