Mr K is Ghanaian, but has been living in Germany for the last 20 years.
He is now practically German.
He had come to Ghana for a vacation after five years of life in Cologne.
His old flame was waiting for him and they had a fantastic two weeks.
They were spending the last night of the vacation in a hotel when disaster struck.
Mr K had gone to the bathroom when the old flame heard a loud thump.
She rushed to the door and her heart sank when she saw Mr K on the floor, with a blood smudge on the floor, out cold.
The hands lay limply as she shook him, the head lolling to the side.
She screamed her lungs out until people came and within minutes, they were in a taxi zooming towards the nearest hospital.
Ictus
By the time I saw his images, he had been through two hospitals and finally landed in the government hospital I was working at.
My heart sank as I saw the large white blotch of acute blood in the grey brain CT scan.
It had filled a third of the brain space on the right, pushing the swelling brain over to the left side.
I made the decision there.
He was young; I could see him trying to move his right hand.
In spite of the battle of neurons raging in his skull, there was still electrical activity snaking through the fast-flooding corridors of his biological wiring.
Enough activity to give me hope that maybe, just maybe, if we took some pressure off, the doorways would open and life would restart.
So we did. Old flame said he was a German citizen and assured us she was going to get a guarantee of payment from the embassy.
She showed us ID cards, so I was convinced.
We activated the process to get him an Operating Room (OR) slot, reserved a bed in the ICU and got ready for surgery.
The strategy was to open the head, cut into the tough envelope surrounding the brain, look for a safe spot to open into the clot and evacuate as much of it as safely as possible, and close.
Surgery went well, with all the steps according to plan. In the OR, we were satisfied with how much blood we got out, and there was nothing new.
On the way to the ICU, we got a CT scan, and were happy.
Four months of no show
ICU was touch and go for a while, and then he slowly woke up over 48 hours.
We checked on him on our twice-daily rounds, and every day was one small step of progress.
The more we saw of Mr K every day, however, the less we saw of Old Flame.
She never got anything back from the embassy, and then one day, she disappeared, for good and Mr K would be left in the ward, alone… for the next four months.
Yes… Four months.
It was four months of calls from the finance office asking me when Mr K was going to pay.
Four months of trying to arrange with Mr K’s friends in Germany how best to transfer him back.
It was four months of hospital admin telling me that the German embassy did not have any plans for citizens who did not have travel insurance.
It was four months of Mr K getting stronger, but unable to get out of bed.
Four months were enough to get bed sores in an understaffed hospital ward, and begin to heal.
The week after Old Flame disappeared, I was alerted one morning about the young man who had arrived from Takoradi and was waiting on the ward.
He had a long story to tell… of a family in Takoradi who knew their long-lost son was in the hospital.
Of a Ghanaian community in Germany who were willing to fly their friend back.
I had no choice but to listen. I had no choice but to grab for any hope I could find, even if I realised that this young man slept in the hospital lobby every night.
After all, the hospital was on my back, the surgeon who had caused financial loss, and every day, Mr K lay quietly in his bed, the loss grew.
Something had to happen quickly.
But that’s the next article…
*Dr Teddy Totimeh is a Neurosurgeon
