Imagine. Can you?

Imagine you wake up dripping with sweat in the Summer heat on a July Sunday morning. The pain is excruciating, a warning that something’s really wrong inside of you. At the E.R., no one pays attention to you. Someone says you got a shallow examination, an injection and a fast dismissal, while doctors affirm nothing was administered because you left voluntarily before they could check you out.
You feel worse and worse, so you go to a chemist’s but they don’t even open the door. They just call 911 for you, or so they say, because no ambulance shows up. You try with the police, then, but they say they can’t help you. Imagine your friends calling a taxi to go back to the hospital, but the driver refuses to let you into the car because he doesn’t have “the police authorization”. You never heard you needed one to grab a cab, but you hold steady and look for another chemist’s. There, they sell you some medicines, but you don’t get any better. While you puke like a fountain, 911 tells your friends that first of all you have to pass through the emergency medical services.* They actually have to drag you there, and the doctor on shift immediately understands how bad the situation is. He calls 911 himself, and finally the ambulance arrives.
Imagine they bring you where everything started in the first place, at Loreto Mare Hospital: it’s now 02:30 a.m. They think it’s peritonitis and they prep you for surgery right away. Imagine your family, who’s hearing from doctors after ten hours, and it’s bad news. Imagine your attorney going to the Loreto Mare’s police precinct to press charges while your friends are on the outside demonstrating to get you some justice. Allegedly, there she was told “you should send them away, otherwise we will take action, and then we won’t hear anything about videos or tortures”.
I reached out to the attorney, but she declined comment: the investigation is still ongoing, it’s understandable.
Imagine to be Ibrahim Manneh, a 24-year-old guy born in Ivory Coast and grown up in Gambia, living in Naples since 2010. You can speak five languages, you are a cultural mediator. Imagine to be dead. Because of medical malpractice, of course, but most of all because of racism. In Italy. On July 10th, 2017.
Imagine, if you can, but don’t worry. You’re not Ibrahim. If you go to the hospital, they examine you. Chemist’s shop open their doors for you, they truly call 911 when they say they do. Taxi drivers let you into their cars. Everything is fine, you’re not going to die in one of the best healthcare systems in the world. Your skin has the right color.

- In Italy, it’s called “Guardia Medica”.
La versione di questo post in italiano è qui.

