The Libyan Operation

Victor Davis Hanson takes a trip to Libya where he has an unexpected detour into its medical care system:

Driving over potholes in a small, cramped Nissan full of cigarette smoke, I thought, must explain the increasing fevers and occasional vomiting I was continuing to experience. Was it car sickness or something I ate? Even when much of the abdominal pain suddenly went away, the brief respite gave way to even more sweats and fever. Or maybe the malaise was due to the newly allowed Al Jazeera beaming in all the cafés, blaring out the usual monotony of IED explosions from Iraq and finger-shaking lectures from Gaza and Lebanon. Finally, after another three-hour marathon session with port officials, I was allowed onto the ship and had my first dinner with the guests. Then I finished a formal lecture on the Roman economy and culture of the early empire in the lounge—and quite literally collapsed in a fever in my cabin.

A few hours after the lecture, I woke up, delirious, and called the ship’s doctor, a young Ukrainian. After a quick examination, she guessed a perforated appendix, perhaps already of some hours’ or even a day’s duration. She then explained the bad—and worse—options: the ship was embarking the next morning on a 30-hour cruise to Tunisia. If I did have a ruptured appendix, surgery would be impossible at sea. I could risk the voyage or, as she advised, try a Libyan hospital, although no Westerner to her knowledge—and she knew of Russians who had worked in Tripoli—had recently experienced surgery in the state-run hospitals. Prior to departure, I had done some research on Libya and remembered coming across an old Wall Street Journal piece that referred in passing to Libya’s hospitals as “dirty death traps.” And I remembered the stories of the Bulgarian nurses and their clinic’s contaminated needles, as well as an offhand remark by one of my newfound Libyan friends that he had just returned from Tunis for “minor” surgery.