On a Mission

We took a much-needed weekend off and headed for Lusaka on Friday afternoon. We booked a room at a missionary guesthouse and planned to just relax and do nothing related to our jobs for a couple of days.

Except for one little thing. Agness, a 12-year-old girl who lives far out in the bush, was diagnosed with cancer last July. Her parents took her to Lusaka to a cancer specialist, and she began taking chemotherapy drugs. Her father came to me in early September and asked for help to get her prescription refilled before she ran out of meds on September 30.

I enlisted help from Louisa Duke, our wonderful physician’s assistant and missionary. Louisa took the prescription to Lusaka two weeks ago and tried to get it filled at the Link pharmacy in the really nice shopping plaza. They had one of the two drugs the girl needs, so Louisa asked them to order the other one and she went ahead and paid for it.

I planned to do just one official errand Saturday and pick up that girl’s prescription at Link. At 9:30 I walked in and told them what I was there for. There were some hesitant glances and consultation among the staff. They weren’t sure if the medicine was in and would need to talk to the manager. I agreed to come back in a few minutes.

At 10:00 I returned to the store. The pharmacist appeared uncomfortable as he broke the news to me: the medication was out of stock and unavailable from their source in South Africa.

I stared at them in disbelief. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “This little girl is out of her chemo drugs on Monday. What am I going to tell her?”

The pharmacist and his assistant looked helpless. Finally, one said, “You will need to go to the University Teaching Hospital. Talk to the doctor who issued the prescription and see if he has the drug or if he can give her something else."

Again I stared in disbelief. With as much calm as I could muster, I told them, “I cannot even read the doctor’s name on this prescription. I am not a medical person. I don’t know a thing about the University Teaching Hospital, and it is Saturday, so the doctor probably is not available anyway.”

The two workers looked at each other. After some hesitation, they agreed to call the hospital and try to find the doctor. I told them I would be back in a few minutes.

Thirty minutes later I was at the counter again. I could tell they were not going to give me good news. “We found the doctor. The hospital is out of this medicine, and they use us as their supplier. They don’t have any other drug that they can substitute. We can try to get the prescription from the UK, but we don’t know how long it will take to get here and it will be very expensive.”

At this point, all the frustrations of living in Zambia came crashing down on me at once. I was also flooded with my own memory from many years ago of having a terminally ill child. Now this sick little girl had only the slimmest chance of surviving a deadly disease in a harsh land, and that one chance might be weeks away—or too late. I had an almost uncontrollable urge to jump across the counter and strangle the pharmacist. “This little girl needs this medicine, and she needs it now,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “Can you please call around to some other pharmacies and see if someone else might have it?”

Their eyes widened a bit as they realized I was not going to just go away. There was a slight hesitation, and then the pharmacist gulped and nodded. “We will try.”

A few minutes of walking around the shopping center calmed me down, and I walked back in with an optimistic smile. This time there was no hesitation as the pharmacist told me, “I am trying, madam. Unfortunately the phone service is down and we cannot make any calls. But I will keep trying. Please come back in a few minutes.”

This time I almost laughed at the absurdity of the situation: Lusaka, a city of hundreds of thousands of people, and the phone network is down. I assured them I would be back.

At 11:30 I was in the store again, this time to hear that another pharmacy did have the drug in stock. That was the good news. The bad news was that the other pharmacy was closing in an hour, so I had to get there quickly.

I found David and we headed for Freedom Way, the part of town that sane people who value their belongings tend to avoid. It’s known as a haven for pickpockets and thieves, and on this Saturday, Freedom Way was teeming with people and vehicles. We inched our way down the street dodging taxis, buses, and pedestrians until we found the store—but no parking. We ended up finding a place to park around the corner. Since we couldn’t keep an eye on the vehicle and leaving it unattended was not safe, we decided one of us would have to stay in the car. I opted for getting the prescription and David agreed to do guard duty.

I stuffed an envelope with the prescription money in my pocket and headed down the sidewalk with a “Don’t mess with me” look on my face. The store was crowded with lines of people, but as soon as I explained my mission, the pharmacist stopped what he was doing, got the box of pills, and had me out the door in less than 10 minutes. He had only a month’s supply but agreed to order more.

Mission accomplished. Almost. The father of the little girl has not yet come to get the drugs. Pray for Agness and that somehow we can get her the medicine she needs.