I stare blankly at the dirty floor.  I hear the shrieks and shouts from the three-year-old boy which make me think he’s having some sort of hallucination.  I can’t believe what I’ve just seen.  Bodies on the floor, on the table, on the stretcher, each person seizing violently and vomiting stool from their mouths, all over the exam tables, all over the floor, even on the doctor’s desk.

I’ve never seen anything like it before.  What could cause such a scene?  An old man is brought in, not breathing, no pulse, pupils dilated.   To make room for the others, we tell his family to take the body away to free up the exam table where they laid him.  The dead man’s wife, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren are among the others vomiting.  He had had the same thing, but was not able to reach the hospital in time.

Every one of them had eaten amala, a local food made from yams, just a few hours before coming to the hospital.  What should have been a normal meal turned out to be severe poisoning, but from what?  I can’t figure it out.  It doesn't present like the usual food poisoning we see here.

There are several children, the smallest three-years-old, plus more than half a dozen adults.  I’m assisting the resident doctor on call and the nurse as we rush to those actively seizing, giving them an injection of diazepam into their thighs.  Within a few minutes they stop seizing only to restart after a few more minutes and require another dose of diazepam.  We start IV lines for all of them and hope for the best.  We don’t have much else to treat them with.  No antidote since we don’t know the actual cause.

I walk back to the house thinking about Joshua and Michaela when they were three years old.   I pray and hope that in the morning they will all still be alive, including the little three-year old.

Jason