What would it be like if you lived in a place where 30%-50% of the people were sick all the time? It’s hard to really comprehend because when you’re healthy you somehow forget exactly how horrible you felt when you were sick. You forget about the constant headache, the nose that won’t stop running, the agony of swallowing with a sore throat, running to the washroom constantly, being too hot then too cold, then too hot again. But you forget because usually it doesn’t last very long and then things are back to normal, and it will be a while before you get sick again.
So what happens when your symptoms linger, or they never go away? Are you able to be 100% productive at work? Can you even go to work? Are you the best mother, sister, daughter, you can be? And what happens when everyone around you is never 100% healthy, and they are always dealing with one ailment or another?
I think about these things because when I first got Mombasa, I realized that many of my coworkers/any Kenyan I met would never have their drinks cold, and many of them cited having a sore throat as the reason. I thought to myself, “That’s weird”, and then kind of dismissed it until my throat got too sore for me to enjoy cold drinks anymore, [and let me tell you, its hard to resist a cold beverage, even though you know it won’t be enjoyable, when its 38 degrees and you’re in the middle of the desert… but that’s another story].
The point is, I took the medicine I had brought with me from Canada and now I’m better, while some of my coworkers have yet to be able to enjoy a cold drink.
One day a coworker asked me what the major illnesses is that affects Canadian children… was it malaria, diarrhea, TB, HIV, bilharzia? And I thought about it and I came up with lice, chicken pocks, the common cold, and that was about it. And he said Canada must be a great place to live, [and although I think Canada is a good place to live, there’s no doubt about it, I don’t think it’s a perfect place to live, and I do think that it doesn’t always serve as a very good example of good policy decisions]. But in that moment, when he looked at me like, “That’s it, that’s all you have to deal with”, I thought, you’re right for the most part, barring some unique illnesses, Canadian children have their health.
Which brings me to an event I learned of the other day when doing some work at a primary school, which made me really think of all this… I was interviewing some staff and they told me of a student who had collapsed and died outside in the school yard recently. I asked what the cause was and they replied, asthma.
Now of course having had asthma since I was around the same age as that student, I was taken aback by the news. I pictured what happened, knowing that respiratory infections are very common and trips to the doctor are not… its possible the child’s lungs were weakened by an infection, and they didn’t even know they had asthma or what asthma was, and running around and playing with their friends, put too much of a strain on their weak lungs and died on the playground.
I don’t know the solid statistics but I know it’s extremely rare for a child or an adult to die from asthma in Canada, (as long as it hasn’t become too severe), once they are aware that they have the illness. Why? Not because it’s a disease without risk but because people are diagnosed, prescribed medicine, and instructed on how to manage their illness.
And so I think to myself, “that could have been me; I could have been that child,” but because of universal health care, I wasn’t that child… and I had my health growing up…
