Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [73]
We have to go to a different department to pay. It costs a whopping YR800, or about $4. We return to the doctor, who takes me to a room where a woman sits next to a tiny infant attached to an IV. It is screaming its lungs out.
The doctor sits me on another bed and draws a screen around us. My heart thuds nervously. I have not been to a male doctor in at least a decade. This man pokes and prods my rib cage, making me yelp with pain, and then moves his hand higher. I draw back in shock. “That is not my rib.” I am too stunned to get up and walk out.
“I think you are having pain in your liver and gall bladder,” he says. “You might have a liver disease.”
I glare at him. “I fell down my stairs and landed on a rib. There is nothing wrong with my liver!” I struggle to pull down my shirt and stand.
He insists that I have a liver function test and asks me if I have been sick. Yes, for nearly three weeks, I say, desperate to escape him. He hems and haws and hands me over to the phlebotomist. I figure there is no harm in having the blood tests, so I let a gloveless woman take a couple of test tubes of my blood. She hands these to Mas and tells us to go to the lab. Clearly, there’s no chain of custody for blood samples. I could stick any sort of substance in my test tubes, or even trade them for someone else’s on the way to the lab. But I’m in a Third World country, I remind myself. I should know better than to have First World expectations of the medical care.
The lab is in a different building. We hand the unlabeled test tubes to a man behind a glass window, who struggles to write my name on them. He tells us they will be ready the next day and that the test will cost YR 4,300, nearly $25, a fortune here. I don’t have that much left, so I will have to dig around the house for loose change. I don’t get paid until next week.
A couple days later, Mas and I go back to the hospital, which is much more chaotic in the daylight. We want to pick up my X-ray as well as the test results, but the X-rays are nowhere to be found. The men in the emergency room walk about their office, looking under piles of paper. Then one of them finds a stack of dusty X-rays sitting unprotected on top of a metal filing cabinet.
“Here,” he says, handing me the stack. “See if you can find one of ribs.”
I stare at him in disbelief but thumb through the transparencies. There are legs and arms and collarbones. Finally, I find one rib cage and hold it up. The doctor looks at it. “It could be yours,” he says. There is no name on the film.
We give up on the X-ray and go to fetch my blood test results, which of course show that I have the healthiest and happiest of livers. The entire experience has been nothing but a monumental waste of time.
WHEN I RETURN to work after Eid, I am told that Hadi will be replacing our designer Samir, who is being moved to Arabia Felix. Despite my sadness at losing Samir, I quickly realize that Hadi is a big improvement. Samir is a lovely designer but slow. I like a pretty front page as much as the next editor, but newspapers are ephemeral things, and what’s most important is that the news gets printed in a timely manner. With Hadi laying out our pages, we close earlier than ever. By eleven P.M., all of the pages are closed and we are in a van home, the men stunned to be heading out so early.
All of the hospitality I experienced around Ramadan and Eid leaves me feeling curious about something. Total strangers often invite me to their homes for meals or tea or qat chews, but my staff members never do. At first I take this personally. I figure that it isn’t that they don’t want to spend time with me. After all, al-Asaadi and Qasim have both invited me out several times. But I am never invited to their homes. Even odder is that Faris has never once invited me to his home.
I bring this up with Anne-Christine one night over dinner. She has lived in Yemen for much longer and is much more knowledgeable. “It just seems