HER SPACE with Bridget Mensah: Dear sis, I was red bed 3

I did not know, until last Saturday, that the emergency room has colours. Not the colours of the walls or the curtains, but colours assigned to people. To patients. To you. When the nurses spoke about me, they did not use my name. They said red bed 3. I heard it before I understood it, the way you hear something in a language you are still learning. I looked around and noticed for the first time the columns marked on the board, the way some patients were orange, some yellow, and some, like me, were red. I did not ask what it meant straightaway. I think I already knew. Yellow felt manageable. Orange felt serious. Red felt like the nurses moved differently when they came to you, spoke a little more carefully, checked the machines a little more often. I was red bed 3, sitting in a chair at the Emergency Unit of Ga East Municipal Hospital in Kwabenya, a cannula in my arm and an infusion dripping steadily into my bloodstream, trying to look calmer than I felt.

It had started with headaches I could not shake, blurred vision and a dizziness that arrived without warning and refused to leave. My blood pressure had climbed to 207 over 120. An ambulance took me for a head CT scan to rule out anything worse, and brought me back. The nurses called what I had a hypertensive emergency, which is a clinical way of saying that my body had quietly declared a crisis I had not been paying attention to. I was not the only one. Within the first two hours of my admission, two women were wheeled in having suffered strokes. The room filled steadily with more women carrying the weight of cardiovascular disease in their bodies, and I sat among them thinking about how ordinary we all looked, and yet here we were.

This is not a rare story. It is not even an unusual Saturday. The World Health Organisation estimates that hypertension affects more than one billion people worldwide, and sub-Saharan Africa carries one of the highest burdens of the condition on the planet. In Ghana, studies suggest that prevalence among adults sits between thirty and forty per cent in many communities, with a substantial proportion undiagnosed. The condition does not announce itself. It is called the silent killer precisely because it can spend years doing its damage quietly, in the background, before the body finally raises the alarm in a way that cannot be ignored.

A doctor came to speak with me, and what he said was not complicated. He spoke about sugar, how excess sugar thickens the blood and forces the heart to work harder than it was designed to. He spoke about salt, which draws water into the bloodstream, increasing blood volume and placing the heart under relentless additional pressure. He spoke about fat, the slow accumulation of fatty deposits along blood vessel walls that can break loose, travel through the body and reach the lungs, causing what medicine calls a pulmonary embolism. Untreated hypertension does not stop at the heart. It damages the kidneys, which depend on healthy blood vessels to filter waste; it strains the liver; it threatens the eyes and the brain. The body is one system. When the blood is under siege, nothing is spared.

He also spoke about movement and the sedentary life, about what happens when we eat and then remain perfectly still. Thirty minutes of brisk walking each day, he said. Not a gym membership or an elaborate regimen. Thirty minutes, portion control, intermittent fasting, and a serious reduction in salt and sugar. He warned about painkillers too, specifically the casual overuse of ibuprofen and similar drugs, which are associated with ulcers and which, in people with elevated blood pressure, compound the risk in ways most of us never consider.

I have had hypertension for eighteen years. It was pregnancy-induced, what the doctor called gestational hypertension, a condition in which the body’s blood pressure mechanisms fail to fully reset after delivery. For some women, they never do. I have known this about my body for nearly two decades, and yet there I was, in a red column, with a reading that made the staff move quickly.

I am telling you this because the woman near me never opened her eyes. Her children had carried her in the way people carry someone when the body has already partly surrendered. I watched their faces as the doctors worked, the particular quality of their terror, the way fear looks on young people confronting the possibility that their mother might not come back. A tube was placed down her throat. She was still. I thought about my own children, about the parts of their lives I want to be present for, and I felt the weight of every meal I should have approached differently, every morning walk I had postponed.

On my other side was a man whose blood pressure had dropped dangerously low; they were working to raise his whilst simultaneously trying to lower mine. Somewhere between where he was and where I was, the doctor said, is where we all need to be. Let us find the middle.

None of this would have been possible without the doctors and nurses of the Ga East Municipal Hospital who showed up that day, and every day, in conditions that are far from ideal. There were not enough beds. Patients sat in chairs for treatment. The resources are stretched in ways that should embarrass those who hold the purse strings of public health in this country. And yet these medical professionals worked with a calm and a dedication that deserves to be said plainly: they were excellent. We owe them better facilities. We owe ourselves the effort of not arriving at their door in crisis.

The cost of that crisis, I should also tell you plainly, is not only physical. The CT scan, the laboratory tests, the medications; none of it is cheap. Many women in that room were navigating serious illness and serious expense at the same time. Prevention is not just a health conversation. For most of us, it is a financial one too.

So, take your medication. Walk thirty minutes each day. Eat to fuel yourself, not merely to fill yourself. Attend your check-ups before your body forces you to attend them. Stop taking painkillers as though they are harmless. Let the people who trained to help you, help you.

I walked out of that emergency room. Not everyone does. I do not know the name of the woman whose children carried her in, but I carry her with me, and I carry the understanding that the distance between a routine check-up and a red column can be shorter than any of us want to believe.

The heart does not negotiate, but it will work with you if you give it the chance.

Bridget Mensah is a PR, Marketing & Communications professional and General Secretary of the Network of Women in Broadcasting (NOWIB). A dedicated feminist and advocate for women in media, she champions workplace excellence whilst empowering voices and building bridges across the industry. Bridget is passionate about amplifying women’s stories and driving positive change in Ghana’s media. She can be reached via email at [email protected]