First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria
Page 18
“What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?” I asked, peering down the barrel of the microscope. Seeing nothing that I could decipher, I passed it along to John.
“Well, you see, when we mix the urine with this chemical, it will clot at precisely three minutes if there is enough hCG hormone in it, indicating that you are pregnant. It seems your urine here made a halfhearted attempt at clotting, but not until four minutes. And now it seems to be trying to unclot.”
“Hah!” I let out a tortured laugh. “My mother always used to tell me that there's no such thing as being just a little bit pregnant. But my mother has never been to Uganda!”
“Let's get you up on the table and do an exam,” Dr. Stockley said.
“Ah … yes … this ovary feels a bit boggy,” he said with his hand still inside me. “Now the normal size of a uterus is that of a chicken's egg. Your uterus feels to be more like a duck's egg.”
“Well, what does that mean?” I asked. What the hell did I know about the size of a duck's egg relative to that of a chicken's? Or what the word “boggy” meant, for that matter.
“Well, it might mean that you are pregnant,” he said, removing his hand and signaling me to get up from the examining table. “But then again, it might mean nothing at all. I have an idea,” he said as if something novel had just occurred to him. “Let's take your blood pressure.” My blood pressure, never low on the best of days, was off the chart.
“Hmmm … I say, this doesn't look too good. If you are pregnant, you'll never get by with this kind of blood pressure. Here's what I think we ought to do.” He looked from me to John. “I think the two of you ought to go out this evening and have a nice cold Nile.” He was referring to Uganda's national beer, which came only in 20-ounce bottles. “And try to relax. Then come back here tomorrow and we'll see what kind of lab tests we can do on you.”
I found this to be an unorthodox prescription—especially for a potentially pregnant woman. But Dr. Stockley seemed to be an unorthodox physician. I liked his recommendation about the beer and I was beginning to like him.
“So what does this mean?” I asked in frustration the next morning as we watched my urine once again coagulate and then uncoagulate under the microscope.
“Well, it could mean any one of a number of things,” Dr. Stockley said. “It could mean that you are not pregnant. It could mean that you are pregnant but that the level of hCG is very low. And that could mean that you are about to miscarry. But I could be wrong.”
John and I both stared, dumbfounded, at the doctor.
“But here's what I think we should do. I think we should get you two to the pantomime show tonight over at the International School. It should be hilarious. I'm in it. Want a couple of tickets?” He rummaged through his desk.
“No thanks. We've got dinner plans with the Marums,” John offered as if we needed an excuse. “Do you know them? Elizabeth runs the AIDS programs for USAID.”
“Oh, nice family. One of the twins impaled herself on their fence a while back. Missed all of her major organs. Lucky. Nice family,” he repeated. “And Larry's a pediatrician! Works at your embassy, I believe. Great! He'll know what to do in case you do start bleeding. Feel free to call me, though, if you need me.”
I was beginning not to like this guy.
Dinner at the Marums' was at least as good a diversion as seeing Dr. Stockley again, even if he was doing his comedy act onstage for a change.
“Welcome, welcome. So nice that we could finally do this,” Elizabeth said as we stood on the front porch of her huge house tucked behind a high metal fence. “Larry and the kids are up in the treehouse,” she said, pointing up into a misshapen flame tree in the front yard. A good twenty feet off the ground was a Swiss Family Robinson chateau, complete with a thatched roof and something that looked like a dumbwaiter.
“Larry! Paul! Sonja! Look who's here,” Elizabeth called up.
A tall, bearded man stepped out onto the porch of the treehouse. “Hey, come on up and see the view.”
A blond-haired boy poked his head out of a window. “Yeah, you can come up. There's plenty of room.”
“Hey, Mom,” a girl called out from the same window. “Can you put one of the cats in the basket and send her up?”
“Later, Sonja,” Elizabeth called up.
“Great house!” John said.
“Larry and the kids built it,” Elizabeth said.
“Wow! A doctor and a carpenter,” John enthused. “I gotta see this.” John headed for the rope ladder.
“I'm not exactly feeling up to the climb,” I said. I followed Elizabeth inside the house.
“Malaria?” Elizabeth asked. She led me into her spacious living room.
“No. I might be pregnant,” I blurted.
“Oh, that's wonderful!” she gushed enthusiastically. “Have a seat.” She pointed me toward a stylishly upholstered couch.
“Only, I might not be,” I added, sinking into the couch beside her.
“Well, have you been to see Dr. Stockley?” she asked.
“Only every day this week.” I hadn't intended to burden our burgeoning friendship by pouring out the whole sorry tale of my impending pregnancy-cum-miscarriage. But there it was dribbling out as I sat next to Elizabeth on her soft couch, admiring the vase of flowers on the piano.
“You want to hear a pregnancy horror story?” Elizabeth asked when I'd finally brought her up to date on my tale of woe. “No, on second thought, you really don't need to hear a pregnancy horror story right now. Let's go see what we can find to settle your stomach.” She led me through the dining room. From the furniture to the place settings on the table to the bric-a-brac on the sideboard, it looked like I had stepped into America.
“I'm USAID,” Elizabeth said, as if she were answering my unasked question. “They ship stuff over from the States.”
We walked through the dining room and into a small hallway.
“There's a powder room if you need it,” Elizabeth said, pointing out a small bathroom. “There's the kitchen,” she said, waving toward a large, very modern-looking kitchen that at first seemed like a mirage to me. I took a peek and saw a two-door refrigerator and a standing freezer along one wall and a big, square island in the middle of the room that held a blender, a food processor, and a toaster oven. The sudden appearance of this all-American kitchen seemed downright miraculous to me.
“Wow, something sure smells good,” I said, inhaling.
“It's chicken Marbella,” Elizabeth said. “One of our favorite recipes. I hope that's okay with you. I forgot to ask what you guys eat.”
“Oh, we have learned to eat pretty much anything,” I said.
“Well, let's see what we can find to help settle your stomach.”
Elizabeth led me into an attached garage with a metal shelving unit that was stocked with cases of macaroni and cheese, peanut butter, jellies, breakfast cereals, granola bars, juices, chips, toilet paper, soap, pet food, and, there it was … soup. I stood there for a moment, reminded of the time I had fallen apart in the supermarket. Ah, what I wouldn't give now to be overwhelmed by so many choices.
“Where did all this come from?” I asked.
“Well, when you work for the U.S. government, you can get a consumables shipment.”
“Wow,” I whispered. It was the first time I had ever coveted another woman's canned goods.
“It's nice. Especially for the kids. When Larry and I decided to come here, the twins were eight and we knew we were disrupting their lives. So the food and the stuff from home, well, it helps them have a bit more of a normal American childhood.” She perused the stock. “Oh, crackers. How about some saltines?” she asked.
As I nibbled on saltines, Sonja and Paul bounded in from outside, looking every bit the average American kids. They were both blond and lanky, with long arms and legs poking out of their shorts and T-shirts. “I heard about the fence,” I said as Sonja poured me a drink.
“Yeah, I won't try to climb over that aga
in,” she said, pointing to the spearlike fence posts. I drained the glass in one grateful swig. “Wow, you were thirsty!” Sonja said.
“Oh, my God! That was the best drink I have ever tasted!”
“Umm, it's just apple juice,” Sonja said and held up a plastic bottle of Juicy Juice.
“Don't you have apple juice in Arua?” Paul asked. His hair was gelled to stick up in the front, just like I remembered boys in the States doing.
“No,” I said with a laugh. “We don't have much in Arua.”
I felt considerably better about everything by the time we'd finished our delicious dinner. By the end of the evening, the entire Marum family knew all the details of the possible pregnancy saga. Elizabeth sent me off with a box of saltines and an invitation to stay with them the next time we came to Kampala. Sonja handed me a bottle of apple juice of my very own.
“Now, you be sure to keep us posted,” Elizabeth said as we were pulling down the driveway.
“And you know, if you do have a baby, I can be your pediatrician!” Larry yelled after us.
The next morning's urine test was as inconclusive as the previous ones. But Dr. Stockley had another idea.
“I say, let's jab you and get some blood and do a serum hCG test,” he said. “Yes, that's a fine idea.” I thought so too. And knowing that blood tests can detect pregnancies earlier than urine tests, I wondered why he hadn't thought of this days ago.
“I'll have someone rush it over to the lab now,” he said as he finished siphoning off a tube of my blood. “Come round at five this evening and we should have some reliable results.” I was starting to like him again.
At 4:30 p.m. John was in a meeting at the CARE office and I was outside stamping my feet. I poked my head into the meeting, caught John's eye, and pointed to my watch.
“If you'll all excuse me,” John said as he stood.
“It seems that John Waite has something more important to attend to now,” Stan said to the group. But he smiled at John and said, “Some things are more important than work.” I was relieved and then appalled as I realized that the country director and probably the entire CARE staff knew of our dilemma. But what did I expect? The expat world was pretty close and we all knew each other's business. And it was the CARE secretary who'd made our doctor's appointments.
We stepped out of the office into the bright, late-afternoon sunshine and found that our vehicle was missing. The yard around the office was a small parking lot of CARE-emblazoned jeeps and Land Rovers. It was gated and guarded, so when a vehicle went missing, it usually meant that someone had borrowed it for an errand because their vehicle had been blocked in or broken down.
“Ah, Mr. John Waite, madam,” the guard replied when we went to inquire about our vehicle. “Your Pajero was quite dirty from the road. The color of Arua was all over it!” The dirt in Arua was a burned red and after a long drive, we—as well as our vehicle—were always covered in it. “It is now being washed out back.” He took one look at my face and added, “It will be finished in ten minutes.”
I looked at my watch. It was already nearly five o'clock. I didn't trust my shaky sanity to survive if we got to the Surgery and found that Dr. Stockley had left for a night of pantomiming and I still didn't know if I was pregnant or not.
“Can you give me the keys to another vehicle? Any vehicle,” John asked in quiet desperation. “Give me the keys to Terry Cross's Land Rover. If he comes looking, just give him the keys to my Pajero. Tell him I said we can trade tomorrow.”
We hopped into the Land Rover and crept along as fast as we could, over the potholed roads that were clogged with bicycles, pedestrians, and dangerously overloaded commuter vans called matatus.
“It's not five o'clock” was the first thing Dr. Stockley said upon our breathless arrival in his office at 5:15 p.m. “And it seems that I jabbed you for nothing” was the second thing he said. “Our lab can't do a serum hCG test. You'd have to go to Nairobi for that.”
“What??? Well, what do we do now?” It was John being indignant and frustrated for both of us. I was just speechless.
“Well, I have one more idea,” he said, sitting behind his desk and scribbling on a piece of paper. “First thing tomorrow morning—”
“Pee in a cup!” I said, finishing the sentence that I thought surely would come.
“No, we've had enough of your pee. No. Go over to see this radiologist,” he said, and handed me a piece of paper with an address on it. “He's a Ugandan fellow. I've heard quite good things about him. He'll do a sonogram. That ought to tell you what you need to know. He ought to be able to tell you if you are pregnant and if it is ectopic or not.”
“Oh, a sonogram in Uganda?” I bit my tongue to keep from saying, Why hadn't someone thought of that earlier?
“And let's take your blood pressure again,” the doctor said, motioning for me to hop up on the examining table. “Just for fun.”
“Your pressure is sky-high, again,” he said, letting the air out of the pressure cuff. “This uncertainty is really bothering you, isn't it?” he asked. “Well, you know, I can recommend one more thing.”
John and I waited to hear what diversion the good doctor would recommend next—opium, perhaps?
“If all else fails, find yourself a traditional African doctor. Some of these guys are so good that just by looking at you they can tell if you are pregnant, when the baby will be born, whether it will be a boy or a girl, and maybe even what it will be when it grows up!” He said it with a straight face, and I didn't have the faintest idea if he was being facetious or not.
The next morning we reported to the address that Dr. Stockley had given us. I was pleasantly surprised to find a nice, well-appointed radiologist's office. A nurse kindly took our information and then handed me a large glass of water.
“You must drink until you cannot hold any more,” she instructed. I sat down in the waiting room and drank. When I'd finished my glass of water, the nurse came over with another. And then another.
“Can you hold any more?” she asked pleasantly while waving a fourth glass of water at me.
“No, I really don't think I can. In fact, I need to pee!”
“Good!” She laughed. “Then you are ready.” She led us down the hall to a modern sonogram room. “Here,” she said, handing me a dressing gown—the first I had ever been offered in Uganda. I nearly cried with relief. “You can take off your clothing and put this on. Doctor will be right with you.”
I was certainly impressed. All I had seen of this office so far gave me confidence that I would soon have a reliable answer.
“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Waite. I am Dr. Nnangwe Joseph,” he said, offering his sturdy hand to both John and me. “I understand that you are anxious to be pregnant,” he said, looking at me.
“I am anxious to know if I am pregnant,” I said.
“Well, get up on the table and we will see what we can do about that.”
He ran the greased-up wand over my flat belly—which made me have to pee even more—and punched in buttons on what looked like a big computer console.
“Here are the fallopian tubes.” He pressed the wand down first into one side of my abdomen and then into the other. He pointed to some hazy squiggle on the screen. “They look clear. No pregnancy there.”
He swished the wand around some more on my belly. He punched some more buttons and stared at the screen, before making his final pronouncement.
“You are definitely not pregnant, Mrs. Waite,” he said rather sadly.
“Well, then why is my period so late? It's now ten days overdue. And what about the cramping and the sharp pains? What are they?” I asked.
“I can see by this sonogram that your period will be coming. See, right here, there is a thickening,” he said as he pointed to an indecipherable blob on the screen. “This means that your period is surely coming. I can confidently say that you will get your period in …” He paused and looked as if he was making a methodical calculation. “In two days.”
“How long have you been married?” he asked.
“Um … just over two years,” I answered, wondering what that had to do with my diagnosis.
“Well, I can see why you are so anxious to be pregnant, then.” He turned his attention to John. “Two years married and no babies! What a shame,” he said while sucking his teeth. “Has your mother picked out a second wife for you yet?”
John and I left the radiologist's office in a kind of quiet shock. Until I had been told that I was definitely not pregnant, I hadn't even been sure that I really wanted to be pregnant.
“How are you feeling?” John asked, putting his arm around my shoulders.
“Disappointed and numb. And worried. 'Cause if I'm not pregnant, then what's wrong with me? My period is ten days late and my boobs are killing me! And I didn't want to say anything before, but I'm beginning to feel nauseous and exhausted all the time.” I began to cry. “And if I am pregnant … well, what the hell were we doing thinking we could even have a baby here?”
“Don't worry. It will all work out.” John said this a lot, and though he was usually right, it didn't make me feel any better just then. Then he kissed me on the top of my head, which did make me feel better. “Dr. Stockley said to come see him after the radiologist. Let's go see him one more time. At least we can be sure that it's not an ectopic pregnancy—and that was the real worry. Tomorrow we'll just go home.”
I wasn't usually in much of a rush to give up the relative luxuries of Kampala for Arua. But after all the running around and confusion, I couldn't wait to get back to our quiet life.