It's a beautiful sunny morning with clear blue skies and the mountains in view as I drive to work on my scooter, avoiding the pot-holes. I work as a physio in a government hospital - I've been there for one and a half years now. When I reach the office I put on my white(ish) coat and head off to the ward. It is packed with children from an accident in a local school three days ago. The ward round consists of four doctors, two interns, three nurses and me. It’s a noisy affair with at least two people talking at any given time!
Unlike our NHS system the hospitals here are ‘pay as you go.’ That means that I have to write the prescriptions for everything and as there are no porters I have to explain to them to get a trolley themselves. The patients from out-patients start to arrive. Each patient brings at least one relative, if not four or five, and they have to pay for physio too. I sort out the line, giving everyone their bills and plaster prescriptions.
I find out that an old man has been dumped outside the emergency 
department two days ago. He has no money and no relatives and so the hospital staff put him outside on the grass to die. He cannot be admitted unless there is someone to stay with him 24 hours a day. There is a poor fund which will provide food and medicine but not someone to look after the patients. My boss says, "Well, we're too busy, maybe later we will have some free time."
We finally get finished up around 2pm and I head to the emergency department. Someone has brought the abandoned patient in from the sun – he is about 60 years old. He has had a stroke, is dehydrated and absolutely filthy. My colleague is clearly upset and says "Unless you know someone who will come and stay with him in the hospital, he is going to be put out again tonight and will probably be dead before the morning." I know this is true, I found a dead body in the motorbike park last week. He was discharged, but couldn't walk by himself, so he died there four days later. I felt terrible, I had come in the bus for a few days and so hadn't seen him until it was too late.
But today the most amazing thing happened -I phoned my husband and asked him to ring round and ask if someone could come to look after the patient. Within an hour and a half someone from our fellowship has come to care for him and he is admitted into the last bed in the medical ward. I eventually get home at 4:30pm exhausted - in one sense happy that the patient has been admitted but in another sense angry. I know that if I had not been in today, that man would probably have died.
Someone said to me last week, "Life is cheap in Nepal." That said, the love shown to this smelly, semi-conscious patient by our fellowship members had to be seen to be believed - it is the clearest demonstration of God's love that I have seen in a long time.
Written by Sandra Boone, InterServe
