IMAN

Do you remember Eman or Iman, the little girl who was operated on for spina bifida? WELL, DURING THIS TRIP I WAS DELIGHTED TO SEE HER WALKING! Her chances of walking were not rated at all high, but there she is demonstrating that in medicine like in maths 2 plus 2 doesn’t always make 4. We embarked on the scanning trail with her too, a bit like the Santiago trail but a lot less fun. She needed a cranial scan to check that she didn’t have hydrocephalus plus a lumbar scan. She went first to the centre where the Rainbow children went but they didn’t want to sedate her (as they had with the others). Instead they gave her a shower saying that this would help her go to sleep???? but of course that made her even more lively, they then told her mother to get her to sleep as if that were easy with a super-active child just two and a half years old (the terrible twos)- in short, a wasted trip. We were told that Enmanuel hospital did scans, so off we set, but nothing doing..it’s a psychiatric hospital just keeping its head above water; we then went to a higher clinic that’s got everything, they gave her Diazepam orally which seemed to perk her up rather than make her sleepy, they tried to inject it intravenously but again to no avail, poor thing- all this lasting 7 hours. The radiologist then told us to take her to Bethel hospital where there are anesthetists who can sedate her, so off we go: And she fell asleep! They put her in the tube, completed the cranial scan and were just about to start the lumbar scan when the little rascal woke up! Oh dear! So they’ll have to go back and do it when she’s sleeping..But Eman is walking!! That’ll change her life..everything else is just incidental..