Day 160, We see a lot of sick people in our OPD department every day. People with genuine illnesses who are struggling to stay alive, men, women, and children alike. It would be quite overwhelming but there are some rather more comedic cases that serve to lighten the mood.
One of the more common ones is when the patient has presented to ask you their age. A bizarre concept, and possibly in need of a psychiatrist in other settings, it is however a semi regular occurrence in Mseleni. Time is not a great concern here and as such seasons and years pass without any account. If you weren’t lucky enough to have an identity card then you may genuinely not know your age. Of course this is a problem if someone wants to collect a state pension, hence the question, “doctor, what is my age?”
Unfortunately I am not aware of many ways of aging a fully grown live adult, especially with the accuracy required for state benefits. The usual procedure is a referral to a social worker who will either look the patient up and down and come up with a magic number or try and correlate it with events at a certain time.
In a similar vein on more than occasion I have been asked the sex of a patient. Were this an unborn child during an ultrasound scan it is perfectly reasonable. However these tend to be adults who have been incorrectly mislabelled as a member of the opposite sex thanks to a clerical error. I then have the task to correct these mistakes. The trouble lies in that with strict professional integrity I ideally need to check for boy or girl parts to confirm the sex, not the stereotypical examination by a long shot. Amusingly, it is inevitably a burly, Zulu man with a beard and alpha male appearances that will have been carrying and ID card with female on it. Luckily I have not had a case which has been to difficult to determine whether they are qualified to use a urinal or not.
Of course we do also get the rather more conventional emergency department quirkiness. Psychiatric patients can often be quite disturbed but at Mseleni we have a regular attender who believes he is a spiritual healer. He will often pass by the department lay his hands on a patient’s forehead, chant loudly in Zulu and then claim the patient is healed, it seldom works. At least it all serves to break up the otherwise taxing working day.
When you say "seldom" works, do you mean it occasionally does? That's magic! (Pun definitely intended)
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