The blaring sound of the ambulance filled the air around the hospital. I felt myself panicking as I gave the old diabetic patient the last shot of his injection for the day. I panicked, not because of the sound of the ambulance but because of the many voices in the hallway shouting, “Doctor! Doctor! Doctor!”
I hurriedly opened the door and saw the nurses wheeling a frail-looking boy into the theater.
“Doctor, please! Doctor help us, my son is dying,’ an old woman shouted from the lobby as she struggled to get away from the grip of the orderly who was trying to stop her from following the nurses into the theater.
‘Relax, madam, we will do our best,’ I said and followed them into the theatre. As the boy's chest went up and down in a weak attempt to fill his lungs with air, I could tell that he was hanging on to life with all the strength in him.
“Lord, help us,” I murmured as I drew some blood samples from his slender arm, to run some tests.
I sent the blood sample to the lab and got to work, struggling to save yet another life. We tried Injections, blood transfusion, mechanical ventilation and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but his heart rhythm kept going down till it all went flat. The boy died.
I felt defeated like I was a disgrace to the medical profession. But my sadness turned into rage as I held the result of the test in my hands some minutes later.
“Madam, did you know that your son had HIV?” I asked the crying old woman before I broke the sad news.
“HIV? God forbid! It’s not our portion!” she said, staring at me like I was a devil.
Minutes later, as sympathizers trooped into the hospital, we realized that just like many others in this village, the family had spent many months taking their son from one native doctor’s shrine to the other prayer house, offering sacrifices and blaming their village people, while their son silently died of HIV.
Word Count: 344 words
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