Casts a la Uganda

I forget about how different things are here, and so I thought I'd document the events of todays re-casting, you know..."just for fun". So Sam, or "the cast man" as I like to call him is pretty much it in the town of Jinja for putting casts on people, he works at about four different places and runs around town basically all day doing so. Here, doctor appointments don't really happen, you just kind of drop in and hope for the best. Yesterday I called the clinic and asked for them to let me know when the cast man arrived, but of course they forgot so I was able to talk to him on the phone to see what time today he'd be around, to which he said 9:30 am. I reach the clinic at 9:30 this morning, kind of check in with the receptionist and she just tells me to go and wait in Sam's room, where I continue to wait for about twenty minutes. Sam comes in, asks how things are going, tells me it's going to be another two weeks but that I could get another cast that was more suitable to begin to kind of walk on, and then procedes to cut the cast off. Now my friends, the tools he used to remove my cast...well let's just say they were not what they'd use in the States. He had this little hand saw looking thing and then this plain open razor blade, I was really just waiting to hear those dreaded words of "oops!" and see my somehow white cast turn a shade of red, but it's all good and I still have all of my toes. After removing the cast I was able to see how gnarly my foot still looked and realized I really did need to have it in a cast two more weeks. And then sends me to go and get an x-ray.

Now, along with appointments, medical charts are also not really something we believe in here. Instead your orders are written on little sheets of paper that you get to keep with you along with things like your x-rays even when you go home. They also like to write the orders in these little notebooks that kids use for school. Anyways...Sam writes on a little piece of paper what x-rays he wants, and I gather my stuff, including my old x rays, and head to another time of waiting. As I was heading there, Sam informed me that the x-ray man "was not around" so I knew some really good solid waiting time was ahead. He also told me just to "flash" him (call him, let it ring a couple times and then hang up) when the x-rays are finished and he'd come back from another hospital he was going to do some work at. There are already people waiting around in the one little corner by the x-ray room that has shade, so I sat on a curb (no waiting room here) in the sun...a little vitamin D is good for you. Finally, x-ray man comes, re-organizes us so I get to sit on a wooden bench in the shade and then he begins to see us. After waiting about 45 more minutes, it was my turn. You go in there, give him your slip of paper, he closes the big metal door, you hop on the table with the x ray plate under the area to be checked, he makes sure to handle the area that's injured as roughly as physically possible, and then is in the room while the x-ray is being taken. You then head out and do some more what?...waiting. After some time, you see him coming out with an x-ray dripping with x-ray solution and he hangs it on a special x-ray film clothes line to dry for "some few minutes".

After he brought me my x ray, I called Sam only to get no answer, I waited in his room, and about 45 minutes after that, he comes, bringing some rolls of gauze and plaster in his back pack. As I assist him in opening the packages of plaster (which is not the light weight, fancy colored stuff, but just the white kind), he brings in a bucket (yes a bucket) or warm water. He then procedes to put on my new cast smoothing everything out rather nicely. Then he takes this funny block sort of thing and procedes to plaster it to the bottom of my foot. Come to find out, that's the closest to a "walking cast" I'm going to get. So needless to say, three and a half hours after I got there, I was able to walk out of there with a new white, skinnier cast, with a kind of growth on the bottom...Gotta love it!