Where There is No Doctor

Novellena was playing football with all the boys in the afternoon. There are male and female teams in the village, though in the afternoon is more informal games, that mostly males seem to play. A few ladies, like Novellena and the two Juliets, will play with them, though the Juliets were gone for the day. Jess and I remarked at how spunky Nova was for playing with the competitive males.

But then that night, as Jess and I played Phase 10 with Lucy, Evenena, Nova's mother, came to our house, asking for some medicine for Nova, because she had pain in her side. It's troubled her since she was a girl. Jess gave her some strong pain killers and I gave her some tablets to calm a stomach.

Afterwards we went to CH to check mail, and we met Mary, Nova's sister, who was coming up to ask CH for medicine for Nova, "because of her appendix." More medicine, different medicine, who knows. No one was back at CH yet, though Jess looked for different meds, though while doing so, we asked Mary if Nova had taken the pain killers we'd given her. Mary said she didn't know, she just wanted to come up and see if CH had appendix medicine. We told her to go check, because we didn't want her to mix strong meds. We didn't see how it could be her appendix, but speculated maybe a kidney problem, a hernia or maybe a cyst in her ovaries. She was crying and in a lot of pain, apparently. Mary didn't seem to know what was going on, nor did she seem to take in our advice, so while we were walking, we decided to go check on Nova and talk to her mom.

Jess and I split up, and it was I who walked to the house, Nova crying in a hammock, Franzea with her and Evenena around. Nova's father stumbles in the room, drunk and trying to gaff me about nothingness, oblivious. Evenena describes where Nova's pain has been, how it has troubled her off and on since she was Rosie's age (the youngest daughter in the family) and pointing to Rosie's youthful potbelly where something stuck out of Nova's when she was younger. They went to the doctors once (I'm assuming in Lethem), who said she was too small for an operation at the time. I explained about not mixing meds, and offered what I thought it could be, and then extracted myself from the house, gaining distance from intoxication, ignorance, unattended pain and helplessness.