What happens when you suspect your child is suffering from H1N1? Alaa Abdel-Ghani was forced to go where you wouldn't normally want to set foot Mustafa had been just fine up until Friday noon prayers. My 12-year-old had been his usual irritable, unapproachable, never satisfied self. He wanted to go swimming in the club, then play football. But he had to pray first and his mood was foul. The sermon was taking too long, it was hot and the subsequent prayer, conducted under an inescapable sun, was, too, inordinately long. Following the sermon, as if escaping a death sentence, Mustafa ran like a rocket upstairs to pack his sporting gear and off we drove to the club. On the way, he looked uncomfortable, complaining of the heat and blaming it on the overzealous sheikh. In the club, Mustafa cut his usual three-to-four-hour swim time to just one hour. He had limited his lunch to French fries and a soda. And this aspiring goalkeeper had not the slightest inclination to lace up. We cut short our club day. At home we stuck a thermometer in Mustafa's mouth; it read 38.5. By evening it had jumped to 40. After giving him something to reduce the fever, my wife Dina and I decided to wait until morning before taking any more action. With three children, we had been through illnesses dozens of times and in normal times we would not have panicked. But these were not normal times and there was one recurring thought I could not shake off: just three days earlier, on Tuesday, Mustafa had been to AUC. It had been commencement day at the American university and the entire family had gone to the new campus in Qattameya to celebrate Dina's newly acquired Master's degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. The campus had been sealed off the entire previous week after seven cases of swine flu were reported in AUC's Zamalek dormitory. For good measure, the AUC bus we took had been taking the dormitory route. The driver possessed the in vogue surgical mask he did not wear and had a bottle of liquid soap for passenger use. After the ceremony we mingled and I distinctly remembered Mustafa shaking hands with an American professor. Throughout the night Mustafa's temperature would not fall and by morning a bad case of diarrhoea had begun. It was time to go to a hospital. But which one? From what I understood, private hospitals were not yet dealing with swine flu. They don't test for it and do not have its cure, Tamiflu. The information operator told us to call 105, the swine flu hotline. The strangest thing happened when Dina dialed 105: somebody actually answered. Dina was told to go to Hommeyat Imbaba, a hospital that deals strictly with fevers and which was the closest near us in Agouza. I had never been to Hommeyat Imbaba, never knew anybody who had. But I knew all too well two things: it was government-run and it was basically for free, and I dreaded both. The two forever conjure up images of inefficiency and poor quality. During the 15-minute taxi ride, I thought about the deaths and thousands afflicted in dozens of countries since swine flu was introduced to the world just two months ago, but despite that, the belief that it will never happen to you, that neither you nor your loved ones will ever get swine flu. Hommeyat Imbaba is a large, flat, decrepit, dull grey labyrinth which looks like it was built at the time of the dinosaurs. It is more outdoors than indoors. Men and women in white were hard to find but nurses were plentiful. They all had masks but many preferred to dangle them from their necks. The hospital's most striking feature is its patients. In their hundreds, Les Miserables -- the poor, the downtrodden, the broken souls of Egypt -- wait for help. I had to wonder when would "help" finally arrive for these destitute and what form it takes. At the gate you are met by what looks like a mass protest. Dozens of people standing every which way but a queue and striving mightily to reach one tiny iron-barred window, seeking what turned out to be a ticket that will give one the opportunity to meet a savior doctor. It would take at least an hour to get this priceless piece of paper so I looked around for help. I found it in the form of a middle-aged intern. "Can you help me, please? My son needs to see a doctor." "You have to get a ticket first." "How much?" "A pound and a half." "Can you get one for me?" "No problem." I gave him five pounds. In a couple of minutes he was back with the ticket and offered me the change which I politely said he could keep. He was grateful and showed it by allowing us into a room which I'm sure dozens had been waiting to enter before I came along. I felt guilty for cutting in line but the alternative was far worse. In this two-bed room, a nurse took the ticket and Mustafa's temperature under the armpit. Still 40. Mustafa was asked to lie down and was given a check-up by a youthful doctor who pronounced him fine. "It's a normal flu," he said. He wrote a prescription for one medicine I was given free and another which had to be bought elsewhere. The check-up was fast, too fast for our liking. We were not convinced. You want to leave a place like Hommeyat Imbaba as quickly as possible and you want to hear that your son is safe but you have doubts when he's not tested the way we heard and read he should be. The swab test comes to mind as an example. Back home, we called 105 again and the second strangest thing happened: someone answered. But I pitied the poor woman who took the call for I knew what was coming. Dina does not mince words and was about to give a withering lecture. One particular memorable quote: "You guys must be joking! You're telling me that a 20-something-year-old who graduated from the school, not of medicine but agriculture, checked my son for possible swine flu, using only a stethoscope? We laugh when we see these things in our soap operas, but now this is real life, and you'd better tell me what to do next and fast because what just happened is absolute nonsense." The woman could not get in a word edge-wise except to say "try the Giza Chest Hospital." The Giza Hospital was pricier (entrance fee LE5), less crowded, more orderly and had infinitely cleaner bathrooms than the hole-in-the-floor variety in Hommeyat Imbaba, and Mustafa needed a lot of bathrooms that day. But as I was to find out, Giza dealt only with bird flu, not swine flu. Better than nothing, I thought. At the gate, I was met by a security officer. "This boy has a high fever and bad diarrhoea. Where should I go?" "The skin unit is that way." I had to laugh out loud. "What skin? I don't want a dermatologist. I want a doctor!" Around a dozen patients were waiting for the kind of doctor I wanted to see. I slipped a female assistant guarding the clinic door LE5 and I was inside in 20 minutes. The same sort of check-up was performed but the doctor was genuinely concerned about Mustafa's AUC visit. Another doctor evinced the same sentiments and was worried enough to write me a transfer letter to Hommeyat Imbaba. The letter read: "Query swine flu." Back in Hommeyat Imbaba I bumped into my old intern friend whom I now got to know by name. "Mohamed, to whom do I take this letter?" "This time you can see the head of the fevers unit." "Why not the first time?" I asked. "Why all this waste of time?" I received only a toothy grin for a reply. By this time Mustafa's fever had broken which was relief. This last doctor allayed our fears somewhat. "Your son doesn't have the symptoms you must have if it's swine flu. He doesn't have a runny nose, he's not sneezing or coughing and has no body aches. And his fever could never have gone down so quickly if he had swine flu. His tonsils are in bad shape and that could cause fever and diarrhoea, but I'm sure he'll be okay." He prescribed the required medicines and that was it. In four hours, Mustafa had gone to two hospitals -- one he went to twice -- and had seen five doctors. Considering Egypt's traffic, red tape and general state of confusion, not bad. His visit to AUC also proved a huge catalyst. To every nurse and doctor I met I repeated the mantra: "This boy was in AUC on Tuesday. This boy was in AUC on Tuesday." Mustafa is back to normal, a bit weak from the fluids he lost but back to his usual irritable, unapproachable, never satisfied self. His family wouldn't want it any other way.
