Afghan Hospitals

Coming back from Sharkardara in the night, we had half of the car full of food. Kg of Angur (Grapes), Behi (quince), Piaz (onion) etc. for the winter. As Javed had a very bad stomach-ache I felt myself responsible to help carrying all of this into the apartment on 3^rd floor. So, I took the huge sac of onions (some 60-70 kg they told me later on) and made it somehow to the 2^nd ½ floor where I was not able anymore to make a single move. I broke down in laughter and cried tears. The others shouted at me how I could be so damn stupid taking this huge sac alone. History will tell that they were more right then they maybe thought – two days later I found myself in an afghan hospital – fearing a inguinal rupture. Thanks God, it was just some stupid muscle inflammation, painful enough.

Afghan Hospitals are an experience themselves. Especially if you come there with pain in your joints. I had first been to a German hospital near to the place where I work, but as the female German doctor was a generalist she advised me better to see a specialist (orthopaedist or surgeon). In the afghan hospital I was perhaps the only foreign patient and as I was not able to walk a single step Javed and his sister drove me around in a wheel chair, so that I attracted the interest of each and everyone. Poor both had to explain nearly a hundred times my whole story, starting from what had happened to me, what I was doing here in Afghanistan and ending somewhere between birth and childhood.

The nurses and doctors were just as caring, sensitive and nice. Though there was this one problem. The doctors were all male and - as they told me - my pain at a place where according to their costumes man where not allowed to look at. Even though one of the doctors took the effort to at least touch my hips under the trousers – looking in the opposite direction, what goes without saying. They decided than to take a radiography to be sure that nothing serious had happened to my bones. The x-ray machine was placed in a huge hall which looked more as a storage room, with all different disassembled medical machines. I had to wear a kind of nightshirt over my clothes, what for I don’t know, and got a radiogram made from my hips. Luckily they couldn’t find anything on the radiogram, so that they send me home again, with the advise to take rest for some days – couldn’t do differently anyways, with those pains…