God in a Bottle

Ndazu caught me between operations. “I have a patient I would like you to see.”
I really did not feel like being confronted with another problem without having adequate means of solving it. Just two days earlier we began working at Kibogora Hospital on the Rwandan-Congolese border and already I had done half a dozen major operations, including two very sick little babies both of whom were struggling to recover from removal of major portions of their intestines. Difficult cases such as these were made more so by rudimentary equipment and shortages of supplies.

“I have a man who was beaten up ten days ago and now is having chest pain and fever, up to 40 degrees” (104 degrees Fahrenheit). We found the patient on the men’s ward, a cavernous austere room of concrete block packed with wall-to-wall metal frame beds. He was lying still on the thin black rubberized mattress, sweating and taking fast, shallow breaths. Nduhura is 27 years old and had been beaten up by unknown assailants following a night of drinking banana beer. After examining him and looking at his chest x-ray, it appeared he had a collapsed lung and blood in his chest cavity, courtesy of the pummeling he had taken.

I suggested as politely as I could, that perhaps he should have had a tube placed in his chest cavity when he first arrived to remove the blood before it had a chance to clot and become infected as it now appeared to be. “Do you have chest tubes and a suction machine to hook it up to here?” Ndazu smiled and shook his head. “This I have not seen in the two years I have been here”.

We gave the patient antibiotics but when his fever continued we took him to the operating room to place a tube in his chest in order to remove the infected blood. The operating room staff helpfully brought an old box full of various sized chest tubes. They then scurried off looking for a bottle system to collect the drainage from the tube. Before long, they returned from the storage room with an antique glass bottle not dissimilar in size and shape to a Starbuck’s Frappuchino. Such a system has not been used in the U. S. since before I became a surgeon thirty years ago.

“Boy, what I wouldn’t give for a real suction machine to hook this tube up to, rather than this sorry bottle system”, I thought. Just then the patient moved and I heard a dreadful crash and the breaking of glass. Now I didn’t even have the sorry bottle system. The OR staff searched the hospital and found a bottle that would work “But”, they warned me, “it is the very last bottle we have.”

My resourceful wife, Leslie, took the stopper for the broken bottle to see if Matt, the handy man from England, might possibly have seen something in the shop that would work. One of the nurses questioned, “Why would you ask Matt? He doesn’t have anything like that.” Undeterred, Leslie found Matt at home and asked him.

“Funny you should ask,” said Matt. “I was just rummagin’ about in the shop today, lookin’ for somethin’ else and I ran across this bottle, wonderin’ what it was for.” With that, he produced the precise bottle we needed and Leslie thought, “Wow, isn’t God amazing? He even cares about bottles.” She was about to leave when Matt said, “Hold on a sec. Next to the bottle was this proper little antique machine. I’ve no notion what it’s used for. Does it go with the bottle?” With that, he brought out a vintage 1940’s suction machine, covered in a thick layer of dust. “Just let me clean it up a bit and we’ll get it runnin’ good as new.”

That very night, we hooked up the machine to Nduhura’s chest tube. It began sucking the infected liquid out of his chest and into the bottle. His fever disappeared and each day he gets stronger. Now, when I look at the bottle, I can’t help but see God.