Fade out.
There is a screaming. This sound has taken over our whole world.
It is shooting out of every pore of a young female, bouncing off the walls and reverberating across the quadrangle, throughout our hostel and probably into all the other student houses.
We are in boarding school in a town north of Lagos in Nigeria. I think it is weekend, but I can’t be sure. It’s a leisurely late afternoon, it must be weekend.
Danke schön, the young lady grins at me. Thank you very much. We’ve just been chatting amicably about my work. She’s considering becoming a doctor. Don’t mention, I reply, as I bandage up her knee. Nichts zu danken.
There is absolute silence in my dorm room. I can hear our collective hearts beating. Our eyes are torn open wide as saucers. We want to look at our bunk-mates for support but we are terrified by the blank panic mirrored in their eyes. She sounds like she might be dying. She sounds like she’d rather be dead.
Bright room, spot lights. Muffled beeping sounds of machines and people working in other rooms in the ER. She’s still chatting with me. I’m down to yes and no answers now, my brows furrowed in concentration as I pull the suture through the wound and knot it. I don’t want her to be left with an ugly scar. She’s asking if she can take a picture. I haven’t answered yet because I need to figure out how to keep my surgical field sterile while responding to her demands. There is a pleasant silence.
Her knee is being sewn up at the infirmary and it is deafeningly obvious that there is no local anaesthetic involved.
I talk her through what I’m doing while infiltrating the wound with a local anaesthetic. She nods and I feel her relax as her initial fear of pain evaporates. Hesitantly, she starts to speak. She probably doesn’t want to distract me. But after my second reply, she picks up conversation. I look over the sterile instruments that the nurse has set up and start getting ready to work.
A young lady limps into the infirmary with blood streaming down her left leg. She tore her knee on a nail on a student’s wooden locker in our dorm room.
Fade in.
A young lady limps into the emergency room in a town west of Berlin in Germany. She tore her knee on a nail on an unfinished table in her dad’s workshop.