Four Freight Trains – February 4, 2024

The white walls are trimmed with blue corners and maroon doors. Hardwood bumpers line the hallway about hip-high to take the blows of hurried gurneys. The paint is chipped at the same height on nearly every unprotected corner and door. I am wheeled into the triage room and the nurse checks my vitals with an automated instrument that hums and squeezes my bicep. A deep and rattling cough reverberates up the hallway from the clinic’s entrance. A middle-aged man is wheeled into the same room and two nurses struggle to get him up and onto the crinkled paper covering the exam table. Rapid-fire Spanish echoes all around, but my ears focus on the wretched coughing. The man is within arm’s reach, and I ask Liz to wheel my chair away to give us at least a six-foot buffer.

The young male doctor looks at my red and swollen knee and, foregoing any blood testing, reaches a conclusion within seconds. Most of the high-speed Spanish escapes my grasp, but I am disheartened to understand two words: “infección” and “Pereira,” the large city that is a two-hour drive from this small town. Pueblo Rico is nestled in the shadow of the massif, Cerro Tatamá and the surrounding cloud-forest jungle in the coffee region of central Colombia. Night had fallen an hour or two ago. My wife, Renée, our son, Joel, and daughter-in-law, Liz, load into their gray Hilux pickup truck and maneuver through the crowded Sunday night foot traffic and parked cars in the plaza. Less than an hour later, we cross the spine of the Western Andes and head south and east down the long descent into the valley below.

In Pereira, I am wheeled into the emergency room where a dozen people wait to be seen. I am given a quick evaluation by a nurse wearing light brown scrubs and soon sit in a wheelchair across from a young female doctor dressed in orange scrubs who occasionally rattles keyboard clicks into her computer. After a mostly incomprehensible discussion between Liz and the doctor, I am given two options: 1) check into this hospital and begin a three-day course of IV antibiotics, or 2) pick up a pocket full of oral antibiotics and treat myself at “home.” I choose the latter. Liz nods in agreement, knowing that if I would be admitted, I might become their prisoner until fully recovered.

In my entire sixty-four years on this earth, my physical life was saved by modern medicine once that I know of and that was just last August. This turns out to be the fourth time I am hit by a biological freight train in the last six months and will hopefully be another victory to be claimed by high-tech health care. Never having fully recovered from the previous recent health crises, this emergency is taking a toll.

After checking into the Hotel Carriqui, Renée spends nearly an hour on the phone in the wee hours, but I am finally booked on a flight home tomorrow, a week earlier than planned. However, after earlier discussions with my doctors in Colorado, we now have a plan. With antibiotics and Tylenol in my bloodstream and my cane propped against the wall next to the bed, I drift into a deep, dreamless sleep.