I was watching a movie with some friends last night at around 9pm. This is a pretty common thing. We all decide at dinner that we are too tired to do anything active and too 'missionary broke' to go out into town. Someone suggests a movie and we all jump on board. We overturn some tables in a conference room, gather our best pillows and blankets, and pack tightly together so we can all see the 15" laptop screen. We are still in selection phase when my pager goes off.
The number says '1700' and I start getting a little nervous because that's the extension for my boss's office. He's the hospital manager and he usual has far better things to do than page me on a Tuesday night. I tell my friends to shut up and pick up the nearest phone. My boss sounds a bit rushed as he says "I need a cooler to transport blood." When I inquire further he explains that we have a patient in surgery that has tumors all over her face. She has already used 13 units of blood and she's only half done.
I hang up the phone and walk briskly down to the hospital, which is only two decks down from the conference room/movie theater. I find a suitable cooler and pack it with ice, using a method taught to my by friend Tommy who used to be a professional blood cooler packer for the Red Cross. When it's all ready I swing by my boss's office and offer to go with him to help out. He gladly accepts. We grab a Togolese surgeon to show us the good spots to get the blood and we all hop in the car with me in the driver's seat. The surgeon directs me to where to go. The further we get from the ship, the more I'm feeling like a blood cell myself. I start at the heart and get pumped down roads, which at first are like wide well paved arteries, but gradually narrow like capillaries the further we go.
We turn around a corner in the middle of nowhere and the surgeon instructs me to pull over. I ask him where he means and he points to a small run down building with a 25 watt light out front. We jump out and wheel the cooler through the door and the surgeon has a brief dialog in the local tongue with a woman there. The only phrase I'm able to make out is 'B positive' and I realize that this is in fact a blood bank. 'B+' blood is a big problem on the ship. This is a common blood type in Africa, but unfortunately most of the crew is not from Africa and our 'A' blood doesn't do much good. The poor 40 or so crew members who are from West Africa get bled as often as is allowable. I'm told that the face is very vascular which means removal of tumors from it requires a lot of blood to be given. Our mission is to get as much 'B+' as we can.
The blood bank lady disappears for a moment and then produces a black trash bag. We look inside and find a single bag of cold red blood marked with a giant 'B+'. Success. However, one unit of blood isn't enough. We load the cooler up again and start off for some other destination that my Togolese friend has in mind. We drive over the worst roads I've ever been on. Far worse than mud ruts during a Vermont spring. We pass over the worst of it and the surgeon turns to me and tells me that I've become a real Togolese man now. Double success. We eventually get to an area that the surgeon finds familiar. We pull along side a random man and after a flurry of words I don't understand I'm told we have to turn around and go down an alley. This process is repeated three times before we arrive at a second blood bank.
This one is well lit and well kept. The attending blood banker invites us inside and we are made to sit on some chairs and wait. When the guard sees the sweat pouring down my head he smiles a bit mockingly and flips on a nearby fan. I utter 'merci' to the best of my ability and that same smile flashes again. After a long time, the blood banker reappears with a promising looking trash bag. We peer inside and discover 4 blood packs. We are thrilled. 5 units of 'B+' is a mighty haul. When we are all packed up, I drive back to the ship a little too quickly. The bumps are bad at slow speeds, but at fast speeds are quite painful and I think I may have lost my newly gained status.
I carry the cooler up the two flight gangway stairs onto the ship and then down two flights to the hospital, muttering about the inefficiency of all that. I bring it straight to the lab for testing before they send it coursing through the veins of the woman under the knife. They are 10 times more thrilled to see it than we were. The three lab techs had already worked a full day and they knew they would be in for a full night too. They used all five units that night and successfully removed the tumors from the left side of the woman's face. Surgery lasted until 2am. She is doing well and will recover for a while before they attempt the right side of her face.
I have never had a job more fulfilling than this one. Yes, I know that if I didn't answer the page last night my boss would have found a cooler and gotten the blood anyway, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that I had some small part in the healing of a person. I witnessed the partial restoration of a human back to the way she was created to be. So thanks to all those who enable me to be here. And thanks to those who are here with me. And thanks to Jesus who loves Africa more than I could imagine.
