Botswanan Hospitals are Nice

Well, after a long night up with Oliver (our 4 year old) suffering from a 41C temperature and uncontrollable diarrhea, he’s been admitted to a private hospital and is staying until they get the fever under control. Our plans to head into Chobe this morning with the Lloyds were rudely interrupted by Oliver’s terrible fever and very unwellness that came on during the night. Fiona spent the night tending to him… not fun. He was delirious and on the verge of febrile seizures for the entire night, and by morning was unable to walk. So this morning Fiona bundled him into the car, rushed to the nearest hospital in Maun and called our South African healthcare insurance company (Discovery). Discovery, without hesitation, said that they’d have and ambulance at the hospital in twenty minutes which would take him to an air ambulance and fly him to a Johannesburg hospital within two hours on the grounds that if the infection gets complicated, Botswanan hospitals (outside Gaborone) are not equipped to effectively treat it. Woah – they stepped up. After much discussion between the healthcare company, the Botswanan doctor and Fiona (who was not that keen on a flight to Joburg unless necessary) they all agreed to leave him in Maun on a drip to load him with antibiotics and rehydrate him. Then we’ll see where we are in the morning. He has been diagnosed with infective diarrhea but because it was caught pretty early everyone thinks he’ll recover well sometime tomorrow. Of the $1500 of just-in-case prescription medications that we were prescribed by our doctor before we left, we had nothing for paediatric infective diarrhea; adults, yes. They’re also testing him for malaria (highly unlikely) just in case.

Oh, the adventure…

The moral of the story: listen to your Mum, don’t play in mud and wash your hands well before dinner, kids. Hopefully Oliver will recover quickly and we’ll be back on our way in full health. Otherwise there might be an unscheduled couple of days back in South Africa. Hugo, Ben and I are playing lots of soccer, swimming and hanging around the bar. Fiona is staying with Oliver at the hospital with Ollie overnight. I’m sure we’ll look back on this with great fondness. Until then, it kinda sucks – and poor little Oliver is suffering.

And another good lesson: make sure you have decent healthcare coverage on a trip like this (we have 2 policies), that the insurer will evacuate you if necessary and that they assign knowledgable case managers to deal with your circumstances. Kudos to you Discovery….