Going to the Mother of the Chief's Funeral

Last Saturday, a cattle truck was filled to the brim transporting a hundred Savelagu villagers to the mother of the chief's funeral.  In Tamale, funerals are accompanied by traditional dancing and music and they are both a diversion for the people and an important social event.  As the truck was attempting to pass another vehicle, it tilted causing some passengers to fall off.  The truck then fell into a deep cement gutter resulting in the immediate death of 15 or 20.  The dead, body parts and sixty others were brought to our hospital twenty minutes away.  The emergency room was chaotic with blood, patients, family and staff.   I triaged - directing the young doctors and nurses to care for the seriously injured and for the administrators and orderlies to move the walking wounded to a nearby location.  A dozen patients were sent to the operating room where four had abdominal operations for internal bleeding, eight had chest tubes inserted for collapsed lungs, two had limb amputations and many had suturing of open fractured skulls, multiple facial and head lacerations.  One experienced nurse suggested where to place the dead and these were laid out adjacent to the emergency room.   Twice the patients were checked hoping to find some life.  There were twenty-five dead patients laid side by side and head to foot.  Two thirds of them may have arrived dead.  Their families were twenty feet away anxiously watching the doctors and nurses work.  It resembled a war scene.  A photo did not seem appropriate but newsmen and others were taking pictures.  The death toll three days later is thirty-one.  Twenty-hour work days resulted but we saved many who would have died.

Today is a a national holiday, the birthday of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana and it is allowing the staff to catch up.  Order has returned although life will never be the same for some families.   A man with an amputated arm, whose face and nose I sutured and with whom I cannot communicate, thanks me in his distress for caring for him.  It touches me.  Universally we are all the same.