Followup to previous post

DO NOT READ THIS POST UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THE PREVIOUS ONE

Perhaps the hardest part for me happened next.  After we saw 10 more patients, clinic was done for the day.  We ate lunch, and didn’t talk about the incident at all.  It was very hot that day, and I decided to take a nap.  I woke up about an hour later, and began to write about the incident in my journal.  At about 4 or so I walked out of our house and saw some of the Malian researchers sitting near the same tree a few hours earlier I had sent the patients waiting to be seen.  Maiga, the Malian Fogarty Fellow, had arranged a meeting that afternoon with the village chief, so I was ecstatic about that.  H. was sitting hearby, and I told him that I wanted to attend the little girls’ funeral.

“I have already do that.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The funeral happen after lunch while you nap.  I attended for two of us” he said in his broken English.

I sat dumbfounded, speechless.  With tears in my eyes, I started to yell at him, telling him that I was just as much a doctor for that little girl than he.  I actually tried to save her, while he sat by and did nothing.  I cursed at him for what he did, and got up and walked away.  I felt like running away, never to return.  

A few seconds later, Maiga and H. approached me, and H. apologized to me in French.  Maiga, translating, said he did not think about the situation with the funeral the same as me and nor did he think of me as a doctor at that time.  After seeing what he saw in the clinic, he now thinks of me as a colleague, and he apologizes procusely.  I accepted his apology, and that was that.  I asked if I could go to the cemetery and say goodbye.  I was told that in Mali, you do not go back to the cemetery to visit the dead after the funeral.  Like most things I have learned here, I accepted it, and moved on.  

It has been exactly 37 days since this happened.  I still think of S. every day I see a little baby in her mother’s arms in the waiting area at the clinic in Doneguebougou or on the streets of Bamako.  I look at each face to see if looks similar to the one that I saw that day, to be sure that I never let one like that slip away again. Now that I have had some time to reflect on the experience and seen how medicine is practiced here, I question if I was the one who was wrong in how I treated S.  Life is precious anywhere, but death is accepted differently in different cultures.  In addition, I realize that my initial reaction to my colleague was overly harsh.  He was practicing medicine according to the type of medicine available to him.  He is a good physician who I still work with at the clinic, and someone who I trust infinitely.  He and I are rather close friends now, and we never speak of the incident, like it never happened.  

From time to time when no one is around after clinic, I find myself searching for the page with her name on it.  S.’s name still has an asterisk by it, and is one of a thousand other names in a ledger on a desk in a small medical clinic in West Africa.  But for me, Souleymane is more than just a name; she is a real person, a little patient that I could not save.  I am haunted by her.