Then a very nice lady
came to me and introduced herself to me. Her name was Annarie, and she was one
of the hospital counselors. She had actually come out, asking if I was the wife
of the man that came in from Nigeria. I did not blame her at all because by the
time we arrived at the hospital, Kechi had swollen to more than twice her size,
and her skin, naturally very fair complexioned, had darkened to almost black.
Also, she had very short hair, because her school did not allow girls to grow
their hair.
After apologizing for her mistake, Annarie
took me to a more private room and talked to me, assuring me that Kechi was in
the best hospital for the kind of injuries that she sustained. She then asked
me where I was staying. I had not even
thought of that! I told her I did not
know but I supposed that Int'l S.O.S. should be handling that. She gave them a
call and after a while they called back and told her that they had booked me
into the Garden Suite Hotel, which was a stone throw from the hospital.
Annarie also
introduced me to another Nigerian lady named Linda whose husband had sustained
serious burns on an oil rig in Port Harcourt and was also being treated at
Milpark.
Then a big, tall man
came in and introduced himself as Dr. Plani, the trauma surgeon. He had a
brusque attitude and a gruff voice. Not exactly friendly, but I got an
immediate sense of someone who was very good at his job, and I relaxed a bit. He told me that they
were about to do a tracheotomy on Kechi. I did not know what this was and I
must have looked puzzled because he explained that they were going to make a
cut in her throat and insert a tube into her trachea and connect it to a lung
machine because her airways were swollen shut and she could no longer breathe
on her own. Also they were going to begin to scrape off the burnt skin to
minimize infection.
He left and came back
shortly to tell me to go and see Kechi before they wheeled her into the
Operating Room.
To be continued...
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