When I first arrived in Sudan I was astonished to discover that the place was teeming with hedgehogs. They were everywhere! The moment darkness fell, out they would come with their squeaks and snuffles, hoovering up bugs with greedy little snouts and sneaking into our food store and mudhuts. My hedgehog paradigm was momentarily thrown off. Hedgehogs are quintessentially English, surely? Wintery little British garden creatures? Apparently not.
It had also never really occurred to me that people had strokes in Africa. I don’t know why. Strokes seem like a peculiarly Western affliction to me, for reasons I can’t really put my finger on. Perhaps it’s because we associate them with getting older, thus the low average life expectancy in many developing countries means that we don’t hear about them as frequently.
On Saturday, a critically ill, elderly man was brought to our health unit in Motot, carried by men from his village who had walked for hours. I arrived to find him lying on the floor (we don’t have an inpatients facility), paralysed and unable to speak, slipping in and out of consciousness. He was, perhaps, sixty years old and had been like this for two days.
We referred the man on to a medical facility with a doctor able to assess him. A day or so later, they told us that it was likely that he had suffered a stroke; that there was nothing they or anyone else could do. The doctor explained to the man’s wife how best to care for her husband at home, then contacted us and asked us to collect the patient. There are no options for long term care here.
And so this morning, we drove the paralysed man and his wife back to their village. He will live out the rest of his days on the floor of a dark mud hut, though he is luckier than some: he has a wife to care for him.
Some things are universal, it seems; though access to healthcare is not one of them.
