Sick Day
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: The Thermals
Topic: Gin&Tonics on the Tigris
In addition to the risk of serious injury from car bombs, mortars, rockets, and stray bullets, everyone living in the Green Zone ran the risk of succumbing to a whole host of routine, everyday injuries. People broke their arms playing basketball, pulled muscles while working out in the gym, and even came down with the occasional case of food poisoning. No one would ever dream of seeing an Iraqi doctor, so thankfully Americans living inside the Zone could turn to either the health unit in the Palace or the Ibn Sina Combat Support Hospital.

The State Department ran a small health unit inside the Palace to handle routine matters that usually led people to visit their family doctors in the States. If a foreign service officer or contractor needed to get a few shots for a planned rest break to Latin American, the health unit could help. They also conducted physicals that foreign service officers needed to receive before starting their next assignments, dispensed simple medications such as antibiotics, and treated minor injuries ranging from pulled muscles to bad headaches. Although the Green Zone health unit served the largest American embassy in the world, the State Department didn’t assign a doctor at the post for most of 2005 because they knew they could rely on the military to provide soldiers with medical expertise that could fill out the health unit’s roster. During most of my visits to the health unit, I never saw a civilian.

For anything more than a stubbed toe, Americans generally chose to visit the Ibn Sina Combat Support Hospital. Shortly after the occupation began, the military converted the large dilapidated Ibn Sina Hospital inside the Green Zone into a modern emergency medical facility.  Then, the military assumed control of the hospital and made it the home of a large U.S. military combat support operation. While the military doctors at the hospital always placed coalition soldiers at the top of the priority list for non-emergency care, they were willing to help anyone associated with the American embassy or military. During my occasional visits to the hospital, I even saw military nurses and doctors help Iraqi day laborers who had hurt themselves on construction projects inside the Green Zone. I also heard that the hospital staff even treated wounded insurgents captured in the greater Baghdad area.

Waiting for non-emergency service at Ibn Sina Hospital was a long, boring experience. Toward the end of my tour, I went to the hospital and waited for hours to see a doctor about a serious ear infection that had inflamed my ear and nearly filled it completely with fluid. After signing into the hospital and taking a number, I had to wait for over two hours before I even met the triage officer. He quickly looked me over, took my vital signs, and made sure that I wasn’t going to immediately die; then he sent me out into the waiting area for another thirty minutes before a nurse practitioner or doctor could see me.

The doctor who examined me agreed with my initial self-assessment and concluded that I had an ear infection. Since he was a military doctor, he also felt inclined to explain the worst-case scenarios and explained in clear terms how painful those scenarios could be. For example, he told me that eventually the pus building up inside my middle ear could simply burst out and come dribbling down the side of my face. According to the doctor, if that happened, I would be in a lot of pain. Despite all the doomsday scenarios that gave to me, the doctor wanted me to tough it out because there was little he could do in Iraq other than wait to make sure the eardrum healed on its own. Then, with a carefree smile, the doctor told me not to worry and prescribed some medication that he admitted probably wouldn’t help very much. He told me I could get the prescription filled free of charge at the hospital pharmacy.

At the pharmacy, I had to take yet another number and wait in yet another line before receiving my drugs, but because I had a doctor’s prescription, thankfully the pharmacy gave me my drugs free of charge. It seemed that no one really cared about how much medicine went out the front doors of that hospital or how much it cost. Every military doctor I met in Iraq had no reservations about handing out medication like candy. The doctor who examined my ear infection wrote me a prescription for antibiotics and threw in some super-antihistamines just for fun. During another visit, a doctor gave me a two-week supply of strong painkillers even though I only needed a seven-day supply. The overmedication of illnesses seemed out of control in the hospital. Whenever someone in my compound had a sore neck or back, at least three coworkers would offer a few pills from their stashes of super-sized ibuprofen or mildly addictive codeine.

Many people living in the Zone had also begun to accumulate stashes of sleeping pills, which that sometimes could get from the hospital. No one wanted to become addicted to them, yet everyone seemed to rationalize that from time to time they needed a deep sleep to get through the noisy night and truly refresh themselves for the hard work they had to perform. Some people used the pill so much that they even created little rules for taking them, such as limiting themselves to no more than two nights in a row and no more than six pills in a month. If they ran out or broke their rules, it didn’t really matter. They could always get more pills.

I tried my best to avoid the hospital and medication because I wanted to be as lucid and mobile as possible during my tour. I didn’t want to be hurt and unable to move if the bad guys decided to attack the Green Zone. Nevertheless, I eventually did hurt myself so seriously that I couldn’t walk due to a Frisbee-related incident that required a trip to the hospital.

My friends and I had gone behind the American chancery to play a quick game of Frisbee on the impeccably manicured lawn. In a gesture oddly reminiscent of British aristocracy in India or Ghana, the Americans hired a large contingent of Iraqi servants who maintained the lush field of grass and small patches of flowers despite the sultry summer weather. I found it disappointing that the Americans almost never used this little patch of green inside the dusty brown Green Zone, so I lobbied my friends to play occasional games of cricket and Frisbee behind the chancery.

On once such evening, I made a lunge for a poorly thrown disc, which I easily caught. However, when I quickly snapped into the upright position so I could toss it back, I felt something crack, and then sharp throbbing pains shot down the length of my back. I tried to stretch and work out the pain, but it didn’t work. With each passing minute, my back grew tighter and tighter. Within an hour, I found it difficult to walk. The next morning, when I woke to get ready for work, I couldn’t bend my back at all. I tried to get out of bed, but the pain kept me from moving. I eventually had to roll out of bed and slowly work myself upright using the wall for support. Tears were rolling down my cheeks from the pain and the fear that I would come out of a war zone permanently crippled, not from a mortar or bullet, but from a game of Frisbee.

It took me 30 minutes to get dressed, and another five to gain the energy to walk to the central plaza of my compound so I could call the motor pool and order a ride to the hospital. When I arrived at the hospital, I waited patiently in line behind a collection of soldiers.  I sat in a hard wooden chair for nearly two hours, trying desperately to fight back the occasional tears that rolled down my cheeks. Once the doctors had finished seeing all the soldiers, I finally saw the triage nurse and the doctor, who concluded that I had a partially herniated disk. They loaded me up with painkillers and told me to take three or four days off from work and come back if the pain didn’t subside in a week.

I told the doctor that I was almost ashamed to come to him after hurting myself playing Frisbee, since so many soldiers and Iraqis passed through the hospital with life-threatening injuries. The doctor shrugged it off. He told me that people got hurt all the time and it didn’t matter if I was a soldier with a missing arm or a child with a broken toe. He was too busy to care who his patients were or why they were there.