Читать книгу Lucille Teasdale - Deborah Cowley - Страница 14

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Baptism by fire

I always thought that all of Africa was a jungle, so imagine my surprise to find a forty-bed hospital virtually in the middle of nowhere. For a population of 40,000, I am the only surgeon able to do certain operations. Fortunately, I brought along my surgery textbooks. – Lucille Teasdale, 3 May 1961

On 2 May 1961, Lucille joined Piero in Milan and together they boarded a UN military plane that would take them to Uganda. As it lifted off, Lucille was bursting with excitement. This was her first trip to Africa and the beginning of a thrilling new adventure.

Acholi dremmers give Lucille a noisy African Welcome On her arrivel in may 1961.

Dr. Lucille checking over a new admission

They flew slowly southward, and she watched with fascination as they crossed the blue expanse of the Mediterranean. Then she spotted its southern shoreline and knew this must be Egypt. The arid desert stretched as far as she could see, while the Nile River threaded its way south into the heart of Africa until it reached Uganda, where it emptied into one of the largest lakes in Africa, Lake Victoria.

Uganda is a relatively small country, about the size of Newfoundland, and completely landlocked. It is, however, blessed with an abundance of lakes and rivers, a rich and fertile soil, and a string of national parks.

The couple landed at Entebbe, Uganda’s principal airport, which is perched on the edge of Lake Victoria just thirty-five kilometres west of the capital, Kampala. Looking across the lake, Lucille could see the distant peaks of the Ruwenzori Mountains, more often known as the Mountains of the Moon. Uganda was just as Piero had described it – a land of the most breathtaking beauty.

On the airport tarmac, the Union Jack flapped in the breeze and reminded visitors that the country had for many years been a colony of Britain. But the next year, in October 1962, the colony would gain its independence and the people of Uganda would finally run their own country. The excitement was palpable.

Brother Toni Biasin, one of the Italian Comboni missionaries, known as the Verona Fathers, met Lucille and Piero at the airport and drove them into Kampala. They found it to be a dynamic modern city, built, like Rome, on seven hills. There were handsome shops and large banks, an abundance of restaurants and cafés and huge stately mansions. Flowering trees and brilliant red poinsettia shrubs lined the wide avenues, and street vendors manned stalls laden with pyramids of fresh fruit – mangoes and pineapples, grapefruits and papayas.

The couple spent their first night in Kampala, and early the next morning, Brother Toni packed them into his old Peugeot and they set out for the long drive north. On the outskirts of town, Lucille spotted the signs of poverty that would become all-too-familiar: long stretches of flimsy shacks housing large extended families all jammed together under one shaky roof. Never before had she seen people living in such basic conditions.

The three-hundred-kilometre journey north would take them most of the day. Along the way, they passed hectares of deep green banana trees and huge coffee plantations that stretched as far as the eye could see. On the roadside, women in long multicoloured robes walked with babies slung on their backs in a hammock-like shawl. Some balanced giant water jugs on their heads while schoolchildren skipped along beside them, their bulging schoolbags strapped to their backs.

The farther north they travelled, the more barren the land became, eventually turning into rolling savannah – parched grasslands dotted with skeletal trees. Soon, they began to see tiny round huts with thatched beehive domes planted among fields of bamboo and eucalyptus. This was the land of the Acholi, the people they had come to serve

It was dusk when Lucille and Piero finally reached Gulu, a town of 40,000 people. Here, they turned off the main road and drove another ten kilometres until they saw the small sign to St. Mary’s Hospital. “I have never felt so far from civilization,” Lucille said. “It seems strange to have a hospital in such a remote corner of the land.”

They passed through the gate and into the compound where three Acholi drummers beat out a noisy welcome. Sister Anna Pia, one of the team of Italian Comboni missionary nuns who ran the dispensary, stepped forward to greet them. She took Lucille by the arm and showed her to their residence, a small building with a wraparound veranda. “This is where you will be staying,” she told Lucille. Piero would sleep in another building.

Before nightfall, Sister Anna Pia gave them a tour of the facility. The “hospital” consisted of one small building with only forty beds. Four nuns, a nurse, and a midwife ran the outpatient clinic, and a maternity unit housed half a dozen newborn infants.

That first night, as she was unpacking her bags, Lucille’s head was spinning with excitement. Before she went to bed, she sat down and wrote to her sisters:“I always thought that all of Africa was a jungle so I was very surprised to find a forty-bed hospital at St. Mary’s mission. For a population of 40,000, I am practically the only surgeon able to do certain operations. Fortunately, I brought all my surgery textbooks. It is very stressful but at the same time it is fascinating because I have the possibility of doing so much for these people”

The next morning, as Lucille walked over to the clinic, she passed a long line of patients who stood silently waiting for treatment. She set to work right away. She started off by visiting a small ward with twice as many patients as beds and began her examination rounds, carefully checking each person in turn. Suddenly, Sister Anna rushed in. “Dr. Lucille,” Dr. Lucille, “she cried. There’s a young pregnant woman who went into labour twenty-four hours ago. It’s her first child and I think the baby is lying crosswise in her stomach with its head on the left. I’m worried that we will need to operate to deliver her baby.” Lucille examined the woman and found that she would indeed need a Caesarean delivery. “Could you show me where the operating theatre is?” she asked.

“Sorry, Doctor,” Sister Anna replied. “We don’t have one.”

Lucille was in a panic. Her first thought was to pass the job to someone else. Then she remembered that there was no one else who could do it and that she was the only surgeon in the hospital. She asked the nurses to lay the patient on the table in a corner of the maternity unit and prepare her for the operation. Lucille then had another frightening thought: I have never done a Caesarean operation! She had observed them at medical school and had read about them in her textbooks but she had never actually performed the operation. For a split second, she was frozen with fear.

She knew that there was no alternative but to try. “I know I have to do it” she told herself. She dashed over to the residence, dug out her medical textbooks, and quickly scanned the pages describing Caesarean deliveries. Then, still clutching a book, she returned to the patient. She scrubbed her hands, donned her rubber gloves, surgeons cap, and mask while Piero gave the anesthetic. The textbook instructions swirled around in her head as she began the delicate operation.

“First, I am going to make an incision into the woman’s abdomen so that I can move the baby’s tiny head into position,” Lucille explained as she precisely made the small incision. Then, very carefully, she reached in and slowly eased the baby out. The tiny body was all pink and greyish and covered in blood. Horrified, she thought, My God, he’s dead! After a few seconds of anxious silence, the baby opened his mouth and gave a piercing squeal. It was the best sound she had ever heard.

The operation was a success. Lucille had delivered a healthy baby boy and the mother had come through it well. With a sigh of relief, she wiped the perspiration from her brow and collapsed in a chair.

Before she left that night, Lucille recorded details of the operation in the hospital’s ledger, adding her initials, L.T. She had completed her first operation in Africa.

Lucille kept the young mother in the ward for several days to make sure there were no complications. When the woman was ready to leave, she wrapped her new baby in a shawl and slung him on her back. She then approached Lucille, cupped the doctor’s hands in hers and said “Apwoyo” – “thank you” in her Acholi language. Lucille struggled to hold back her tears.

Lucille’s days were long and full. She spent most mornings checking the long line of outpatients who waited outside her small office. In the afternoon, she performed a non-stop succession of operations in her makeshift operating theatre, which was little more than a table and a single flickering light bulb. Drugs and antiseptics were scarce. There were so few instruments they often had to be re-sterilized during an operation. Conditions were, at best, basic.

“It seems as if all Africans are sick,” Lucille wrote to her sister, Lise. “Most of them have malaria… Its difficult to care for the local people because you cannot question them. They do not know their age and they have no idea of time. They tell us that they have been sick for two weeks but it could have been two days or two years.”

Lucille was also learning to adapt to a whole new life outside the hospital. She told her sister, “I don’t eat as well as I did in Montreal, especially the meat. There is nothing but beef and chicken. On the other hand, we eat lots of vegetables (tomatoes, cucumbers, red peppers) and fruit (oranges, bananas, grapefruit, mangoes, papayas, which are a sort of melon which I don’t like). At mealtime, we drink water with a touch of orange juice added. The one thing I really miss is milk. Oh yes, and maple syrup. And every night at about 10 p.m., we must turn out the lights since the electricity is cut off from 10 p.m. till 7 a.m.”

On weekends, she and Piero went for walks in one of the national parks. In another letter to her sister, this time written by the glimmer of an oil lamp, she wrote, “On our last trip to the park, we stopped for a Coke and suddenly, just a hundred metres from where we were standing, there were about twenty hippos! They were splashing about in a pond and making so much noise with their huge mouths. We also watched in wonder as many giraffes and rhinos and several elephants loped past us.”

While Lucille was adjusting to her new life, Piero spent much of his time seeking funds to build a new pediatric ward and an operating unit. He wrote dozens of letters in which he badgered friends and family, governments, and voluntary agencies to donate money and equipment. After almost six months his efforts paid off, and four military cargo planes arrived carrying ten tonnes of equipment into Uganda for the hospital.

Lucille became so caught up in her new life that her two-month stay stretched into four. Time passed quickly as she was enjoying her work and felt she was making a significant contribution. And she was growing accustomed and attached to Africa and its people.

She also enjoyed the time she spent with Piero. She loved driving off with him on weekend hunting trips, which in those days were a popular pastime, or going on safaris to one of the game parks. Everything was so new. So exciting.

However, Lucille still planned to finish her course in Marseilles, and she finally decided it was time to return to France. As the day of her departure approached, she realized more and more how much this new life had meant to her. It was also becoming clear to her that she had become very fond of Piero.

On the night before her departure, Piero took her aside and, holding her hand in his, he asked her to consider returning to Lacor. He had been looking for years for someone to share his dream, he said, someone to work with him in Africa and help him build a hospital that would be the finest in Uganda. “There’s a lot of work to be done here, and we make a good team,” he said. He paused, and added:“Besides, Lucille, I love you. I love you very much and I want you to marry me and stay here with me forever.”

Lucille was stunned. Her first reaction was typical. “Are you mad?” she asked. “You cannot ask me to marry you just like that! It is much too quick. Anyway, remember that we had a deal. I came here for two months and it’s already four. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“But Lucille,” Piero begged. “If you do not know after four months, then you never will. Lucille, I love you.”

Lucille needed more time to think. She had fully intended to finish her term in Marseilles, and then work for a period in child surgery in Paris so that she could obtain her diploma. She had even contemplated returning to work in Canada. Did she want to give this all up for a MAN? No, she thought. She would keep to her plan and return to Marseilles.

It was mid-September when Lucille packed her bags and prepared to leave. She walked through the wards for one last visit with some of her patients. She greeted a small child she had operated on the week before and offered a comforting word to his mother. She waved to a group of tiny children whom she had brought back to health and who would soon be returning home. Then, with a lump in her throat, she said goodbye to all the Sisters, hugging each one in turn. She climbed into the waiting car, and drove away.

Piero had decided to return home because his father was undergoing an operation in Italy. He suggested to Lucille that she meet him in Italy on her way back to France. She agreed to stop off in Rome so they could spend a few days together. Piero met her at the Rome airport with a bouquet of red roses. They spent three days visiting the famous sights of Rome before travelling together to Besana to visit Piero’s family.

The family welcomed Lucille like one of their own. Piero was now thirty-five and his parents had almost despaired of his ever marrying. They saw in Lucille the perfect wife for their son. For her part, Lucille felt much more comfortable with them than she had on her earlier visit. But she was still not ready to commit herself.

At the station platform in Milan, Piero took Lucille’s hands in his and said:“Lucille, I want to offer you my thanks for all your help and support these past few months.” Then he paused, gathered his courage and asked her again, “Will you marry me?”

As she stepped aboard the train, she gave him a cryptic reply. “I promise you that one day we will see each other again in Gulu.” They kissed goodbye and she left for Marseilles.

Sorrounded by the Comboni nus, Lucille and Pierio Cut their wedding cake following their marriage in December 1961.