Losing myself.

It has not been since December, when Elijah was born, that I have felt so many emotions in a 24-hour period.

The background: I mentioned Ruth, the wife of Urbano, a couple posts ago. There was one part of the story I left out: Ruth has been suffering intermittently from severe abdominal pain for months. Some of the symptoms were especially worrisome, so we tried to get her into the hospital the next day, but unfortunately, we couldn’t get her in for a couple weeks.

Eric, our teammate and gracious host, volunteered his car, and his day, to drive to the village with me to transport Ruth to the public hospital here in Mwanza. The results: Ruth’s health problem required an operation, and we set a date (this last Tuesday) to pick her up and take her in for the surgery.

Another layer: While Ruth was having tests run, I hurried from the hospital down the street to my language class, where I had to defend why I was seven minutes late. The teacher inquired the next day about the prognoses. The following day, she shared Ruth’s prognosis with Dr. G___, one of her students, an Asian doctor who devotes most of his time to repairing the botched surgeries of the previously mentioned hospital. He was skeptical of the diagnosis, so he asked the teacher to arrange with me to bring Ruth to his language session this Tuesday, instead of to the hospital for surgery. I gladly obliged.

The stories converged this Tuesday, when I left the cybercafe to drive to the village to tell Ruthie about the change in plans. She was excited, and relieved, that she would get to see this other doctor. We welcomed her to our current house (the Guild’s small guest house) for supper and left to meet the doctor, who turned a small classroom into an examination room. He quickly, with much exasperation, determined that the original diagnosis was wrong, blatantly, unforgivably wrong. Dr. G___ invited us to visit him the next day at the surgical theatre at the Catholic Hospital, where he would find us between surgeries, order additional tests, and provide a new course of action.

After a late night spent visiting with Ruth over chai, we traveled to the Catholic hospital early in the morning. I phoned the doc, who answered during surgery to direct us to the theatre, where we unfortunately spent most of the day, seeing way too much (imagine MASH with cement walls), pieces of stories more tragic than I care to describe. At the end of the day, when there was no reliable test or labwork to derive information from, Dr. G___ (visibly shaken by the day in surgery) reverted to low-tech medicine—incisive questions and skilled touch—to form a diagnosis.

I don’t feel comfortable disclosing the exact diagnosis, but the Dr. found two problems, one obvious, the other obscured by the first. The first problem is easily operable (scheduled for Sept. 19th), the second is not—at least not here—but can be mitigated by medicine, hopefully reducing pain, and diminishing the risk of a serious, or fatal, complication.

Ruth’s response: Sheer thankfulness to all involved, especially God who orchestrated it all.

My response: Emotional wreckage. Two days on the verge of tears. Why? Because in rapid succession, I felt every possible emotion: I felt humbled, outraged, faithless, guilty, privileged, exorbitantly wealthy, insufficient, prideful, unprepared, thankful, sad, judgmental, annoyed, completely exhausted, taken for granted, overly depended on, in the wrong profession, in the best profession, blessed, yet so powerless. Truthfully, by African standards, there was no cause for this small experience to affect me so greatly.

But all these emotions, day after day, are gnawing away at something greater: my very identity

I am so used to controlling my own destiny, yet in spending so much time with people with no such illusion, I am losing my notion of control, I am losing my center. You could even say I am losing myself in the process, or at least redefining myself, as something other than the center, not primarily the actor, but increasingly the acted upon. People here understand this well, so they value their stability within their community over their long-term well-being. And, from Ruth’s perspective, the web of relationships provided her something her entire family together could not have afforded: access to a good doctor.

But… The final layer.

Aaron, in a previous team meeting, prayed specifically for Ruth. He prayed that God would provide her with a good, honest, skilled doctor, that would help her.

Perhaps this is the only layer that matters. And perhaps in this layer I will find the center, and find myself as well.