It is 2 a.m. and Fadila is stepping in the car park of the Malpassé regional health center, a modern and charmless cube pushed into the middle of the large cities of 13e arrondissement of Marseille. Fadila, 58, wears two surgical masks – one on her nose, the other on her mouth – and does not want to enter the still full waiting room. “I am contact case. Do you accept me, Doctor? “, she asks, worried, when she finally sees Slim Hadiji, who this Thursday in April keeps his weekly night shift.
A few minutes later, in the privacy of the consultation room, this Marseille maintenance agent unveils her fears. After testing positive for Covid-19 two days earlier, but without major symptoms, she “Don’t know[t] more what to do ”. His doctor, infected, closed shop. Her sisters, also diagnosed positive, advised her to go see “Doctor Slim”.
That night, she was not sleeping, she came. And leaves more serene, with a prescription of anticoagulant and antibiotic, the telephone of the nurses who will come to see her for ten days, and a prescription for blood tests. ” A good initial care would have avoided 50% of the hospitalizations we know ”, the doctor sighs, salt and pepper hair, thin glasses and an impeccable shave under the mask.
“Doctor Covid”
“Doctor Slim”, “Doctor Covid”… Slim Hadiji responds to different nicknames in the northern districts of Marseille. Since the start of the pandemic, this 47-year-old general practitioner has made the fight against the coronavirus among the populations most remote from care a ” personal business “. He has earned a reputation there that far exceeds his regular patient base, already with 1,800 names. In the city of Professor Didier Raoult or the anesthesiologist Louis Fouché, standard-bearer of the Réinfo Covid collective, he fights against the confusion of minds.
This Ramadan night, the gratitude of his patients is measured by the bowls of chorba, plates of samosa and dishes of tagine, which arrive on his desk. “Doctor Slim, he put himself in the middle, he was not afraid of the Covid, he went to the front for us”, sums up, cash, Djenia, a regular at the nursing home, arrived in slippers around midnight, with her mother, Malika, to renew her prescriptions.
“SOS-Médecins no longer comes to these cities. You have to think about people who don’t have cars. »Slim Hadiji
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