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opinion

The Other Side of Paradise

"For the birds" may not be so bad, comparatively speaking
by Susan Hahn

There was a priest, a minister and a rabbi who, playing their weekly game of golf, were debating the definition of the beginning of life. The priest said, with the wisdom befitting his vocation, “We Catholics believe life begins at conception.” The minister smiled and shook his head saying, “No. Life begins at the moment of birth.” The rabbi, laughing at his two friends said, “No, no, you’ve both got it wrong. Everybody knows that life begins when the kids leave home and the dog dies.”

I wish I had heard this truism about seven years ago when the kids left home and Leo, our Golden Retriever, went to his final reward in Doggy Heaven. Unfortunately, both my esposo and I were in a temporary state of psychotic euphoria at the time and we adopted three rescue birds, all with undiagnosed mental conditions. In retrospect, they were a perfect fit.

Sydney is a Blue Front Amazon Parrot who will have a conversation with you, inquire as to your health and attempt to sing opera when she feels the spirit. However, if you should be so insensitive as to ignore her for 10 seconds, she will scream, “I’m over here, I’m over here,” until she is indeed blue in the face.

Mic and JoJo are very large Moluccan Cockatoos. They have a hot breakfast served to them each morning by said esposo, and if it isn’t to their liking, they aren’t shy about letting you know it. JoJo is spoiled and used to being held for hours at a time by her previous owners. Mic came from an abusive home and his vocabulary is colorful to say the least. And the least said about that, the better. JoJo and Mic have fallen in love, and thereby lays the tale.

The other day Mic and JoJo were expressing their fondness for each other and I needed to run some errands. Not wanting to leave them in their outside cage, I attempted to escort the love-birds to their separate sleeping cages, and in so doing, I got nailed by one testosterone-laden Moluccan. This bite wasn’t just an impulsive reaction on his part. He planned it with malice and picked the perfect time to perpetrate the crime. He chomped down on my arm with the gusto and torque of a bulldog. (No offense to bulldogs.) He did not let go until I shook him off. At which time he blasted me with profanities you would not believe could come out of the beak of a bird. I couldn’t help but be reminded of that scene from The Exorcist.

So, what is all this leading to, dear reader? It leads straight to the front door of the Bocas Del Toro Public Hospital. I will admit to letting a day go by before I got up the courage to go there. I’d heard horror stories about the conditions and treatment at that hospital and couldn’t help but be wary of its unfortunate proximity to a series of structures that include:

1.      The hospital proper;

2.      A large building next door with a huge sign painted across the front which says, “MORGUE;" and

3.      The community cemetery, where you will often see a vulture sitting atop the cross over the entrance gate. I’d had a fleeting thought that one could probably ride the same gurney past all three places as kind of a one-stop shopping center. So it was with trepidation I walked in the clinic last week.

The small waiting room had about 15 metal folding chairs lined up in rows with a counter and large scale at the front of the room. The scale had the outlines of men’s, women’s and children’s feet painted on the platform. I supposed that was to help you know which way to face while being weighed. The nurse at the counter finally pulled her eyes away from the Sunday church service on the television and was all business as she stuck a thermometer under my arm pit. She definitely wasn’t happy that I had waited a day before coming. Even in another language, that was pretty clear. She then weighed me in front of my fellow sufferers and I remember thinking it was better for my quickly fading sense of pride that I didn’t know the metric system. She carefully used a piece of gauze to hold the thermometer she removed from my armpit; she read it, shook it down and replaced it in the same empty glass with the three others. I wondered how may armpits I had shared that day and wished I’d come earlier in the morning.

I was instructed to have a seat and wait. Not having brought reading material, I quickly developed an interest in the church service on TV. However, the congregation apparently decided to take a mid-service break, so my eyes wandered to the food pyramid on the bulletin board in front of me. I couldn’t quite get the meaning of everything but I did read the word “MUERTO” over a picture of a starving child. Seemed like they were making a point about proper nutrition, albeit a bit heavy-handed. Not wanting to focus either on the Muerto or on the TV’s current concern with the afterlife, my gaze shifted to a family of extremely productive workers. Ants, that is. I watched in fascination and amazement as about 20 of the Lilliputians carried an enormous dead fly across the floor, up the wall, under a gap in the screen and out to what I supposed was their home beyond the confines of the clinic room. Lucky ants! I thought of bolting too, but just about the time I stood up, I was called to see the doctor.

That part went pretty well. She looked at my wound and told a nurse to clean it. She gave me a prescription for antibiotics that I would have to buy elsewhere because the hospital pharmacy did not have antibiotics. In fact the hospital pharmacy consisted of two shelves on one wall of an eight by eight-foot room. I was taken to a similar room where I couldn’t help but notice the remnants of the last treatment. Desensitized by this time, I just killed the ants crawling around on the treatment table. I was about to ask the nurse to please wash her hands (at the risk of sounding pushy), but she did put on surgical gloves. The only problem was that when she donned the gloves, I noted an IV line and receptacle for a needle protruding from the area around her wrist. Maybe she was just practicing her IV technique on herself.

She did a fine job of pouring what might have been hydrogen peroxide on my wound and covering it. I paid only $5 for some antibiotic cream and was out of there. No gurney, no morgue, no cemetery. I would have happily paid more if that could have bought me a disposable thermometer and a bug-free treatment table, and possibly a nurse without a needle in her arm.

We are currently attempting to buy local health insurance and in so doing have seen other hospitals in David and Panama City that are fine facilities where anyone would feel safe and well cared for. The Bocas hospital staff was doing the best they could without the resources that even the poorest free clinic should have. The question that begs to be answered is why is it that the residents of Bocas have such poor health care conditions when there is state of the art health care available one half hour away in David. Something is definitely wrong when even my birds get better care than the citizens of Bocas.

Also in this section:
Sirias, A time for truth
Leis, Equality before the law?
Hahn, Sometimes you may want what's for the birds
Amnesty International, A call for an independent investigation of Guantanamo suicides
Committee to Protect Journalists, Costa Rica should reform its archaic press laws
García, The fictional US drug report on Venezuela
Lerner, Defending against the political assault on homosexuals
Silié, The dilemma of return for countries that generate emigrants
Bernal, University of Panama political jive
Jackson, How giants are likely to be slain