Life in Slow Motion

‘I feel like its two years when its only six weeks, the time passes very slowly’ says Newton as we chat in Kizito. Newton is lying on his bed, there is a Denham pen inserted just below his knee, at the end of his bed hangs a 5kg weight and a 2kg bag of sand. The weight is applying traction to his leg through the pin allowing his shattered thigh bone to unite and maintain its original length.

I don’t spend much time in the surgical wards. The hospital’s surgeon Mike Currie spent over twenty years working as a GP in Somerset so there is little flow in medical consults compared to the stream from the other direction requesting lymph node biopsies, formal chest drains, reviews of abdominal pains. Like medicine though surgery is different here. Back home Newton’s comminuted fracture of his femoral shaft would have been treated with open surgery and internal fixation without the need for lying in bed for six weeks. Either way though the fracture should heal well.

Newton explains that he was working cutting down a tree with a chainsaw when the accident happened. ‘It fell and one of the branches got stuck in the neighbouring tree, then wind came and without knowing it feel on my leg crushing it’. Thankfully he was not alone and there were people there to free his leg. However he was in an isolated area of the bush about 50km from his town. He recalls how his colleagues brought him to a nearby village where they were able to splint the leg with some sticks. There they were also able to call his uncle who came and picked him up.

He went to a town’s hospital but as there were no doctors there his uncle decided to drive him a further 80km to St Francis. ‘The following morning I went to X-ray and then to theatre for the pin.’ I glance at the X-ray showing fragments of bone where once a smooth femur existed. While the time passes slowly Newton can feel that his fracture is healing ‘my leg is getting better, at least, it is not as painful as it was and I can lift it a bit’. Newton passes the time listening to gospel music on a small radio his friend has brought him, reading any magazines he can lay his hands on and talking to fellow patients.

Newton describes the downsides of lying in traction as including have to wee into a jug, open his bowels onto the bed pan and pain from the pin site ‘right now the fracture part is not paining, but what is paining is here in the knee and and it doesn’t allow you to move, you have to be here, I have just been lying here on the bed, I have not stepped onto the floor.’

He is not a big fan of the hospital food either, and particularly the quality of the nshima ‘its not an easy thing but I just have to eat. You know the food prepared for many people is not as good as food prepared for individual persons.’ I assure him that in most hospitals I have worked the patients tend not to like the food.

I ask Newton about the effects of his confinement on family life and business. He is 32 married with three young children. Newton has a small business cutting timber. He cuts this under license in government owned forests ‘we pay loyalties to the local chiefs then you get a letter to recommend to the government’s forestry department. I sell the timber in Petauke and Lusaka. They use it for making furniture. It’s a fair living.’

The likes of health insurance, income protection even social welfare certs wouldn’t be common in Zambia and Newton explains he will loose a lot of money due to the fracture. Again as I have seen here time and again it is the family structure who will some to his aid. ‘Relatives will help me out and help out with my wife and children’. Newton’s aunt will spend the entire six weeks staying by the hospital, coming in with food and doing his washing. His wife needs to stay at home and care for the children but they do manage to visit once a week or so getting bus transport.

The knock on effect is that Newton’s two employees are also now out of work. He optimistically hopes to be back working within a month of going home.

Despite the income loss, pain, bad food and boredom of lying in bed for six weeks Newton has nothing but high praise for the hospital ‘out of all the hospitals I have seen I count this one the best, all the doctors and staff are so committed.’ So how long more has he left in traction ‘Four weeks and three days down, I have got countdown time in my head’.