Friday, June 19, 2009

Last night, my friend and bike tour guide, Kobe, cooked a great dinner of banku and fish and okra stew for me. It was absolutely delicious…the only issue was that there were lots of bones and one of them got stuck in my throat. Whenever something is stuck in my throat, other parts of my body start to hurt like my right arm and my head, so I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking maybe the bone had penetrated the tracheal tissue and was now traveling in some blood vessel toward my brain. I was also very sleepy, so I went into a slight state of delirium and I called my doctor, Tope, and he said I shouldn’t be worried because if it was in my esophagus, I would be hacking and choking but since it’s in my trachea, then it should go down but if not then go to the doctor in the morning.

This morning…it was still there. So, I went to the Herbal Doctor at the centre and he sent me over to the hospital to get an X-ray. This took about an hour…meanwhile they were giving the rats more pap smears to see if they got pregnant. I took my X-ray back to the doctor and since he didn’t see a bone, he concluded that there was probably just a sore from the bone and that it was causing the pain. So, everyone at work was saying that it was all psychological and I wanted to believe that but it didn’t stop me from feeling something jabbing my throat. They kept telling me to just swallow a big ball of banku and it should go down but I ate banku twice yesterday and if I eat it again, I may just go into a coma from a chronic case of the itis.

Now, we are at Bernice, Edwina, Edith, Prince, Mike, Rashid, and the 6 other of our friends from the University of Ghana apartment and we were supposed to be learning how to make Banku but since I’ve already eaten so much banku, we decided to just make spaghetti. It hurts to swallow food, so I had to eat slowly. After dinner, I tried hacking up the bone again and I was successful!! So, I guess my experience has shown that X-rays cannot be used to locate fish bones because they aren’t dense enough. We watched 3 movies: A Family that Preys, Freedom Writers, and Getting over Sarah Marshal. And since it was raining and pitch black outside, we decided to spend the night and leave in the morning. Now, I can rest easy knowing that there is no fish bone traveling toward my aorta.

O and today was Tope’s birthday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Happy Birthday TK!! Save me some pepper soup!