We have a secondary student who has been complaining of lower back issues. Pain progresses throughout the day and radiates to arms and legs. So call the doctor or chiropractor you say? Let me tell you the process….so far.
Chris came home from school for mid-term (remember he boards at secondary school so we only see/hear from him during breaks). He told us about his back issue but with only a day left of his stay there wasn’t much we could do but show him some stretches to try and see if that would help. A few weeks later he called and said they weren’t working….I really have no idea if he was even doing them, stretching is a bit out of their comfort zone (as I was showing him how to do the stretches he was giggling like a school girl), just give me a pill to fix it seems to be the mentality. When he called he said the teacher had been giving him pills….”what type of pills and what are they for?” we asked. “I don’t know” was Chris’ answer. He was taking them because a teacher said to! He was also told he should go to a local hospital (Kangundo)…we told him under no circumstances would we take him there, people go there to die is what we’ve been told and had some experience with.
We told Chris to call us in a week so we could arrange an appointment with the chiropractor (the same one Chuck had seen a few months ago…great guy by the way who has been doing chiropractic for over 40 years and fixed Chuck’s back up nicely). Why have Chris call us to find out if we made an appointment? There are no land lines at the school for us to call so if the student needs to talk with us (for anything..medical issues, field trip money, transport to get home, etc.) they have to call us using a teachers phone. Sounds easy enough but that means using the teachers shilling for the call and they won’t allow that so the student flashes us (calls us, lets it ring once and hangs up) so we’ll call back. Since we don’t have every teachers phone number in our phone it gets to be a game sometimes if/when we call back (to combat that we’ve told the students to text us with “call me” along with their name). But that again is using the teachers shilling and they frown on that.
Anyway, in the mean time I called the chiropractor to set up an appointment next Monday. He doesn’t take appointments but he told me he’d be in his office starting at 11am. Ok, we’ll show up at 11am and see what happens (thankfully we have other things to do in Nairobi).
Now I’m trying to contact the principal at Chris’ school to make sure he can get out of school on Monday. Again, no land lines and each time I call one of the three phone numbers I have for the principal I get a message saying the phone is turned off.
So you see, this whole process really becomes a big headache, but what else do you do when this is the course of action which seems best? It’s just how it goes here.