At 3:15 am today I heard my 2 year old son Shams scream my name. I was in my bedroom five meters away from his. It was an unusual beckon. One of a child who has had a bad, very bad, dream. A nightmare. Even these little angels have them?
I jump out of bed and run towards his room. I am half asleep in my quest to hold my baby in my arms to comfort him an to tell him that everything is alright. I am here for you my son, don't worry. Yet all of a sudden I find myself sliding on the bedroom carpet and falling headlong into a low table. I hear a crack and and sense extreme pain in my left hand. Yet I get up convinced I just had a bad fall and scurry on towards his room. Right before I open his bedroom door I feel something very warm gushing down my hand . I lift my hand, and now the warm sensation is transferred towards my elbow. Something red was oozing down towards my arm and elbow. What is this? Blood? Impossible! This is a dream. Why am I bleeding?
I hear Shams's nanny enter his room. She will comfort him and I recoil into the bathroom to asses the damage.
I look at my hand and in horror see that my thumb has been half severed and a white bone is protruding out of my skin. My thumb is sadly listing at a forty five degree angle towards the left. My childhood dream was to be a doctor. For many reasons I cannot delve in to here, I did not become one. So I curiously looked in to the protruding bone and bleeding and listing thumb. It didn't bode well. I have never broken a bone in my body before. This is a calamity! Will I be able use my thumb again? This is new to me, and my mind starts pacing, and racing. What do I do now? What do I do now? It is Friday dawn in Cairo. Do I call a family member or doctor friend for assistance? No. Don't bother someone at 4 am in the morning with something like this. I decide to go to the Dar El Fouad Hospital emergency unit.
I wrap my thumb in four layers of Kleenex, jump in the car and furiously drive towards 6th October City.
Four police blocks later I arrive at Dar El Fouad.
It is now 4:30 am and the pain is excruciating. I enter the Emergency Unit. I see the resident doctor. He sees my predicament. In two minutes a nurse asks me a list of medical questions, I am tagged with a bracelet, I am bar coded, I am X-Ray-ed and I am in a very familiar room tended by the young and just awakened Dr. Maged. He is a young, handsome, very intelligent emergency unit surgeon. I feel relieved he is young. I have so much faith in today's youth. He professionally tells me that this procedure will hurt from the moment he will inject my thumb with an anesthetic, to the moment he re aligns my bones in my thumb. He proceeds and makes nine stitches to seal the wound.. He has therefore very well managed my expectations. I groan and moan while he does what he promised to do. I am X-Ray-ed again and the thumb is back in place.
I am left alone in the room to await someone to escort me out. I cry. I cry floods of tears. The awakening of my child at 3:15 am that led to my destruction of my thumb, that lead me to the journey to reach Dar El Fouad also lead to another experience.
While I thought that my thumb was the most important thing to my existence, and while I was wallowing in self pity and grief, and blaming the universe for my misfortune, a very young woman is rolled in to the berth right next to me. She is pregnant. Her colour is the colour of a lemon. Her facial features beautiful, yet immobile. She looks like she is in another world. I try to look in to her eyes, but her eyes do not see. A nurse rushes to close the curtains between our berths and we are separated. I hear the doctors talking. She is a four month pregnant woman who passed away before she was even brought in to the hospital. They don't know the medical reasons for her death. They make assumptions It is a cold, methodological, clinical assessment of the situation. These are two souls who are no longer with us. A mother and an "in body" child? Can there be a tragedy worst than this?
I try to be as empathetic and compassionate as I can with this beautiful soul, yet I can't. Her grief is overwhelming. Here she is is, so young, so expecting, yet so far gone away from our world.?
Her mother enters the room and starts wailing. She is hugging her daughter, and grandchild, in utter disbelief.
My thumb pain and my predicament now seem so dwarfed by the magnitude of this tragedy I am now witnessing. I was ashamed for being in pain! What trivial pain can I be in? What self pity am I wallowing in? What grief is this mother experiencing this moment? Unfathomable !
Now the tears are freely rolling. I empathize, I understand, and I am silent..
