A cursory glance at general opinions about South Africa’s public health care facilities, and you begin to see them as places where people don’t necessarily go to find help – but to die. The video evidence on social media is as ubiquitous as it shocking, probably most worrisome when you’re in a certain income bracket.
From frail patients being made to sleep on the floor to staffers straight up refusing to render their services, or just sleeping on the job. And no one seems immune from the cistern service, given that we’ve seen celebrities being subjected to its most effluent variants. (Remember radio broadcaster Tom London’s video rant at Helen Joseph Hospital in 2024?)
So when, in the wee hours of last Monday, I limped into Colesberg’s Manne Dipico Hospital, one could forgive my general apprehension. Like prisons, one seldom finds anything that stimulates good cheer on the hospital floor. Needles, drugs, the lingering smell of disinfectant that conjures up grim memories of ‘social distancing,’ lockdown and death during the Covid pandemic. And, we haven’t even started on the grim faces worn by some of the staff.
About 6 am was probably not the best of times to go limping in there, just when the nurses were looking forward to ending yet another gruelling twelve-hour shift. But this was an emergency. And if they didn’t like it, I probably hated it even more. It’s strange how an anecdotal event can have one waxing lyrical about how this seemingly personal experience likely has universal undertones and interpretations. After all, is that not the foundational underpinning of Ubuntu – that the individual’s experiences are not experienced in isolation, but are indeed a microcosm of a collective reality? A reflection of the macro.
Lately, I’m inclined to believe that even more. Those epistomological theories of the butterfly fluttering its wings, and the energy eventually bearing consequences for us all. In this case the triggering butterfly is, let’s call him Pharaphara – a sobriquet commonly denoting the worst of scallywags in the parlance of the streets. They are in the business of money – making it by any means necessary, but their favourite being to simply take it. To the next person that’s theft, to the Pharaphara, it doesn’t really matter what you call it. Theirs isn’t to split hairs but to grab the loot and vanish, which is what he was trying to do when I caught him in the middle of a home invasion.
I would’ve had him in some form of citizen’s arrest were it not for my right knee – injured as a kid and never having healed properly – unexpectedly giving in on me when I had both hands on the intruder. I’m not going to try to explain what a dislocated knee feels like save to say, it’s so intense, so debilitating, it feels like what I’d imagine going into septic shock must feel like.
At the hospital, the first thing you notice is that doctors aren’t around all the time. So a nurse points you to a bed with instruction to wait until they will arrive around 10am.
When the doctor does get here, he’s brisk: we need to get an X-ray to see what’s really going on. After that, I steel myself as he sticks a thick needle into the knee to expel some of the blood. I’m a scrawny guy, but the knee is starting to look like that of a sumo wrestler. Then we must put the joint back in place and affix a brace to it — thankfully under local anaesthetic — and WhatsApp messages will be sent to the orthopedic surgeons in Kimberley to establish where to from here.
Soon it’s determined that this is an emergency but, as the doctor says, ’emergency’ here is relative – could mean anything between ‘immediately’ and a month or even longer, so he recommends that I hang in there for a few days. Surprisingly, he’s also an honest man: ‘If you had medical aid, this could be over and done with at a private facility.’
From there I’m in a ward with five other males. This is the part I especially wasn’t looking forward to – being reliant on others for the most basic of necessities. The aforementioned videos of horrendous service and scoffing nurses had me particularly uneasy. It’s given public health care a bad rep, and so I went in there expecting filthy toilets, threadbare blankets, and dirty, unlit corridors. Oh yes, cheeky nurses and indignant doctors too.
Yet almost from the start, my presumptions – like my body – didn’t appear to have much of a leg to stand on. The first thing I noticed was the presence of that most noble aspect of any institution, workplace or unit where people must co-exist: discipline. From the cleaning staff to the nurses, there seemed to be plenty of it to go around. Discipline and the profound sense that the people not only took pride in their jobs, but always knew that there was a superior who would be displeased if they failed to do it properly.
To the patient, this translates into easy familiarity with the routine. You quickly catch on as to what time meals are served, and when the medication or fresh linen will come rolling by. Everything, for the most part, functions like clockwork.
But hospitals do not function outside of the broader public service, and as a result, they too bear the ripple effect of governance and the social ills that plague the town or country. So, several days into my stay, there have been water outages here as well.
The government speaks about introducing a National Health Insurance system that will deliver universal health care to the masses. I will tell you why I think that’s a pipedream, and also about some of the interesting characters I’ve met here, in Part 2.
Featured image: The Manne Dipico Hospital in Colesberg. Source: Manne Dipico Hospital Facebook page.