Mahajanga, Madagascar

We had quite the scare last night as one of our 60 year old friends on the cruise decided to have a seizure, chest pain and v-fib requiring defibrillation and CPR. They had some trouble getting IV access and getting him to stop seizing and since his wife was a doctor and she knew us we were asked to come and assist. Little did she know how out of practice we all were but we helped a little with moral support and such and he actually did well enough that he woke up and was stable enough to try to transfer to Johannesburg today.
It made us very aware of our own mortality and how lucky we are to be able to do what we are doing. The logistics of getting transfer and rescue operations in this part of the world are amazingly hard though and we didn't envy the ships doctor one bit as she negotiated with several parties to try to get the patient off the ship to a facility that could get a CT scan, etc. At one point we were actually talking about having to move to international waters to avoid sovereign airspace since one country wouldn't let another fly at night. That is nothing a doctor needs to deal with when taking care of a sick patient. Fortunately the doc has been doing this for 5 years and was fairly nonplussed by the bureaucracy involved.
Since he was stable we were able to get into the port of Mahajanga and hopefully later today he will fly out.
The other interesting thing was that the most important player in this whole thing may have been the insurance company that was paying for the evacuation. They helped more then an insurance company really should but since the government agencies were not so hot it was important that they got involved. We are signing up for some later today. :-)
The town was not such so interesting although we can say we were in Madagascar. We were pretty tired after all the excitement late at night so took advantage of not much to see by not doing much. We felt like we just got off call and remembered why we retired. :-)Read more