Medical care in Baghdad

I think the best piece of advice is, don’t get sick in Baghdad.

They have public hospitals and they have private hospitals. The public ones are apparently dirty on top of everything else, so if you have money, you’d prefer treatment in the private ones.

I never experienced the public hospitals myself first-hand, though, so I can’t personally vouch for how dirty they are.

All I saw was one private hospital. It was clean. However, it didn’t seem to have any of the other characteristics typical of a hospital. In fact, it seemed more like a hotel. There were people that came to clean. And there were nurses standing around. There did not really appear to be doctors. You have to call your own doctor, and he or she comes to visit you at the hospital/hotel, rather than coming to visit you at your own house.

And the nurses don’t do much, they just gather in a huddle and jabber. Both men and women.

Maybe I’m being a bit too harsh. I was only there for four days. But it didn’t seem like there were routine nurse visits or anything. It was up to the family of the patient to go and call the nurses when they were needed.

I feel like in well-run hospitals, the patient — especially an old patient with many problems — is hooked up to lots of wires, and there’s the constant beep to let you know the heart is still beating, that the blood pressure is good, that all those vital signs are constantly being checking.

There’s none of that in the fancy, private “Royal” hospital in Baghdad. You feel right off the bat that the rooms are missing something — that there’s an emptiness. There’s no medical machinery. You don’t have that reassuring beep letting you know the patient’s heart is still beating.

Eventually, someone might come by and give the patient an IV. I didn’t know this before, but if you leave the IV in the vein for too long — past when all the fluid has been suckled into the bloodstream — the IV actually starts pulling on the blood, and the patient starts bleeding, and it splatters all over the clothes and everything.

The reason I never knew this is because in all the hospitals I’ve been in before, the nurses come in and take the IV out of your vein before it gets to that point. Not so in Baghdad’s Royal Hospital! You, the untrained family visitor, have to know that the IV will expire in a burst of gore, you have to keep an eye on it, and you have to go flag down the jabbering nurses to let them know and have them take it out in time.

I’m remembering now there was the odd doctor that came around. She had inch-long painted talons on her nails that she didn’t seem to want to ruin, because she really didn’t do much. No gloves, no masks, nothing, just a white coat that honestly seemed more and more like a sham as the days went on.

You get the impression they’re not really there to treat patients. They’re there to show-off — look at me! I went to school, I got the white coat, and now I get to parade around the hospital, high-status, with perfect make-up, hair, and nails on display.

Never once was there a sign of anyone of the staff washing hands as they moved from patient to patient. Those long nails were never sterilized.

Going back to the IV point, if I remember correctly, the hospital doesn’t even supply that as part of the patient’s stay. The patient’s family has to run around to supply stores and get all the implements of treatment needed. What you pay the hospital upfront is just for a bed. All the rest, you must supply.

Oh, wait, I even gave them too much credit there! They didn’t even give us a proper bed. They actually had us buy the right kind of mattress, a mattress that will do continuous little motions and massages on the back to keep blood circulating and help a patient avoid bedsores. All the hospital provided initially was a lump of faded foam. Faded foam decorated with cheap and flimsy and synthetic sheets.

The hospital doesn’t have simple supplies like diapers. Then they come in and ask, so, did the patient get the vitamin B shot yet, or not? (Vitamin B that the family rushed out to the pharmacy to buy, because why should the hospital keep it in stock?) The treatment plan is not recorded in any organized fashion.

They didn’t even do things like regularly wash patients. Didn’t lift them up and change their position if they were too weak to move themselves. That went on for two days until one time the personal doctor came, realized the situation, and he went and yelled at the nurses. That brought a bit more activity and energy. I think he told them something to the effect of, are they just paying you to stand around?

Then every time a nurse did show up and do something, you have to give them 10,000 dinars, to show your proper thanks and get them to please please pretty please come back at some point. That’s less than $10, but STILL. It’s like tipping for service, except your life depends on it this time.

There was only one worker I remember who came by regularly and everyone liked. She wasn’t a nurse, though. She was like a nurse’s assistant. She actually did all the work, while the “real” nurses just stood around jabbering at their hallways station. She said she didn’t have the right grades or something to be allowed into the nursing programs, so her profession was a step further down. She wore a gray-blue uniform, while the nurses wore something less dreary, I don’t exactly remember. But it again just seemed a whole status thing was reigning in the hospital. If you did have the right grades, and you were the real nurse, then that meant you didn’t have to get your hands dirty, you could just stand back and watch. Like, you didn’t have to do the work you were actually trained to do, because that would take away from your high-class status. The work was all left to the assistants, instead. They were low-class, but actually helpful and useful. It was all very weird and strange.

On my first night in the hospital, though, I had a good first impression of everything. Quite a few nurses and doctors did come by. And everyone was extremely extremely sweet in how they talked to the patient. The way they spoke was so loving and gentle. But after that, everyone just disappeared! I don’t know where those nice nurses went. Instead, we were left with the beauty pageant queens and this huffy male nurse who was too good for anyone to even talk to.

So indeed, try not to get sick in Iraq; and especially try not to get sick if you have no family to go out and buy all the supplies you need (I mean, what kind of a system is that???); oh, and also don’t get sick if you don’t have enough money to elevate your sickbed from the public (supposedly dirty) to the private hospital.