tongues and tumors

Today was strange. I know I've been here for a while, and maybe I should be used to it by now, but I still struggle with the vast disparity of emotions this place brings with it. It's so hard to find my footing when I'm swinging between two extremes, hope and despair in beds on opposite sides of the wall.

Ismatou is twenty six years old, her neck swollen by a huge goiter. She came to us earlier this year, but was too sick for surgery. Sent home on medication and told to come back in a few months, she showed up at the ship yesterday full of hope. During routine pre-operative screening, we discovered that she was pregnant, which she staunchly denied, pointing to her one-year old little girl as proof. The evening staff gave her a bed for the night, and it fell to me to sort it all out this morning.

It's simple, really. Based on her last screenings and the information she could give us, her pregnancy was early in the first trimester. There was no way we would risk her baby's life to perform the surgery, and with the outreach drawing to a close, there's no time to reschedule her. I got to tell her.

She cried and she begged, falling to her knees next to her bed and holding her hands out to me, pleading for me to do something. To find a way for her to have the surgery. Her eyes were haunted and her fingernails dug deep grooves in her skin as she clawed at her neck, trying to tear out the curse she's living under. Tante Alice, she told me through a translator, you don't understand. I am ashamed. How can I continue?

I told her that she needs to be strong for her children, for the little girl staring at her mama with wide, frightened eyes, and for the baby growing inside her. She asked if she could come back on Monday. I will come back and I will not be pregnant. She doesn't have money for surgery at a local hospital, and so I know that the abortion she was thinking of having would be performed in a back alley somewhere. I told her, no, that she shouldn't come back, that we would not schedule her for surgery, hoping against hope that she would realize that an abortion was pointless. She dropped her eyes from my face and flicked her wrists, palms-up. So then it is decided. I will go home and I will make a poison and I will kill myself.

What can you actually do when faced with despair like that? I have no clue what she suffers, not the faintest idea of what it's like to go through life with a huge tumor on my neck, considered cursed by the people who see me. I had no words of hope to offer her, nothing to say that would give her a reason to live, and yet I was sending her out to face the world again. Alone.

So we prayed and we cried and she asked a few more times. And then she grabbed her child, tied her roughly to her back and was gone.


And then, on the other side of the wall, a shout went up. Nasif is a little seven-year old boy whose jaw had been frozen shut after an infection while he was a baby. He had surgery two days ago to graft some cartilage from his rib into the joints in his mouth, and he was trying out his mouth exercises when he discovered that he could do something he had never done before.

I rounded to corner to see a little imp in a purple, flowered gown, sitting on his bed surrounded by adoring fans. His head was wrapped in clean, white gauze, and everyone was cheering like he'd won a gold medal when he showed them his new-found skill.

Que est-ce que tu peut faire, I asked him, since I had missed the big show. What can you do? And in typical little boy fashion, he smiled and stuck his tongue out at me.

It's the first time in his life that he's ever seen his tongue. He knew he had one, but it was locked away behind teeth that didn't move, and now for the first time, he can open his mouth and smile and put a spoon straight in when he eats. And he can stick out his tongue.

So tell me, if you can, how I'm supposed to feel right now. I saw absolute despair and pure, unadulterated joy one after another today, and I'm just not sure where that leaves me.