You won't die of boredom in SA

Helen Joseph Hospital 23h45

Deep in the underbelly of Johannesburg’s public health care system, I watch the worm churn.

I should be sleeping, waiting for Cheaters to start on DStv, or drinking. Instead I am transfixed by the sight of blood gushing from a large gaping wound on a young boy’s head. The wound is so deep you can see the white of his skull. The pink flesh under his cropped black hair is intermittently obscured by the blood that flows past his ear to take a path down his shoulder. Already his white vest has soaked up too much of it, so it wells down his shoulder, over his elbow then drips onto the floor.

A Jack Daniels would do fine right now, but I don’t have a hope in hell of getting a glass of water around here. I didn’t give that much of a damn about public hospitals before. I mean, yes, there was the intellectual angst, but I’m on Discovery Health Classic Comprehensive, so the chance of me landing up in a place like this was zero. However 2008 has seen me become a full time writer with all the attendant financial benefits, so I’ve become a little more concerned about the state of our public health care system.

We’ve all read the headlines:
“Dying mom had to wait 8 hours”
“Massive vacancies in public hospitals”
“Surgery backlog lasting”
“Jo’burg trauma units operate on skeleton staff”

These days they come so thick and fast with the city’s crumbling health care system that they’re a mainstay. It’s not even news anymore. The fact that you’ve got a good chance of dying in one of Jo’burg’s public hospitals is so common place you don’t even think of it until you can no longer pay your exorbitant medical aid rates. And when that happens the first thing you think of is: “Oh Jesus. I’m buggered.” That’s when you become religious and start praying that nothing happens to you.

But back to Helen Joseph and that youth who’s bleeding profusely. I watch the male nurse give him a stern look. The boy looks back dazed and confused, he’s lost a lot of blood now. The nurse realises he’ll have to find someone to mop the floor and puts a refuse bag under the boy’s wheel chair so the blood can congeal on the black plastic instead.

I take a quick glance around the room. There are two Muslim shopkeepers with puncture wounds to the gut. A drunk woman who’s been beaten by her husband. A man with a gunshot wound to the leg. An oke lying on a stretcher who has lacerations all over his face. I can’t work out what else is wrong with him. He’s sleeping, comatose or dead. Behind me the continual chaos of ambulances coming and going, bringing in fresh wounded.

I’m not here for any of them.

I have been waiting for hours for the girl who’s lying beyond the two swing doors of the trauma theatre. She’s just turned 20 and was raped and stabbed sixteen times in the neck.

We are waiting. That’s what people do here at Helen Joseph. They wait. They just wait. Sitting in the emergency ward bleeding. Sleeping on the floor at admissions. Hanging around smoking at the entrance. Everyone waits.

On duty tonight, two young interns and a burly looking male nurse. They’re doing the best they can, but the ambulance arrives every five minutes with new flesh in a crazy ritual that reveals what’s happening in our inner city. Gunshot wound. Knife wound. Gunshot wound. Vehicle accident. Domestic violence. Gunshot wound.

I stand up to stretch my legs and walk to the casualty entrance where the ambulance arrives and pours sliced-up gangsters into wheelchairs and onto scuffed steel trolleys. I stride out and into the night air where a wheeler dealer whose face was sewn up earlier today is begging for fags, and a lift to the next party. I wonder how soon he’ll be back.

To amuse myself I go to reception and look through the admissions register to check my theory of inner city violence. Gunshot wound. Stab wound. Gunshot wound. Domestic violence. Gunshot wound. Rape. Gunshot wound. Gunshot DOA?

I paced back through the admission’s area. The benches are full of people fast asleep, huddled in blankets. They’re waiting for admissions to open tomorrow so they’ve got a jump on the queue. They’ve been waiting much of the day. They will wait again tomorrow. Along with the blankets they have brought food and water. They are used to waiting.

I look at my watch. I have been here since 18h07. Six mind numbing hours. I am waiting for a rape kit for the stab/rape victim who’s been in trauma theatre on a cold, steel trolley since 11h14.

Her drama started just after 09h00 this morning when she was stabbed and raped by her ex. It happened in front of her two year old child. The attacker is the father of her child. He’s a debonair man who the police have let out of jail on two domestic violence charges because he dresses so well, and prays to God for forgiveness. This is same man plunged a knife into his girlfriend’s neck with such force that it broke off at the handle when it lodged in her vertebrae the sixteenth time. It was an ordinary knife. Plastic handle. Thin blade. The type you’d by at Shoprite for less than twenty bucks.

“Hey squeeza. You are soooo beaaaaaaaautifull. Give me your number squeeza.”

My thoughts are distracted. There’s an intern with chiseled features standing at the trauma desk looking down her nose at a man two heads shorter than her. He can hardly stand upright. He is filthy. His forehead is sliced open and there’s blood dribbling down his eye. His shirt is torn, muddied and bloodied. He’s wearing broken, dirty jeans and only one shoe.

“Come on. Your number squeeza? You are lovely. I will make you sooooo happy.”

The trainee doctor gives him a condescending look and says in a French-African accent: “Can you not see what you look like? Can you not recognise that you have been stabbed and still you are trying to proposition me? Sit down and wait. You are drunk and behaving like a stupid fool.”

The male nurse, who looks more like a celebrity body guard, leads the man back to a chair, where like so many others here he sits, and waits, and bleeds.

I speak to one of the Muslim guys who says he went to defend his brother who got into a fight. Mid explanation an Imam rushes into the trauma waiting room with ten or so other Muslims. They start speaking Arabic and gesticulating. The Imam looks cross. He goes to the trauma desk and rings the bell indignantly. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. He and his cohorts demand better service for their bleeding friends. Not even the religious elder can change the order of things. The Muslim protest squad is hustled out of trauma, and like everyone else the stab victims must wait.

Much of today I have been arguing, demanding and at times shouting at the two young female interns on duty. In a hospital that fields the lion’s share of violent trauma causes in Johannesburg, why is there no rape kit? And when the rape kit arrives, why is there no one trained to administer it? Repeated questions to which there are no answers.

At 01h47 the next day a detective arrives from the Child Protection Unit to administer the rape kit properly so it can be admitted and accepted as evidence in court. The rape victim has waited over 16 hours face down on a cold steel gurney for this evidence kit, so she can have her day in court.

Once detective has done his thing I drive home to finish off a bottle of Jack Daniels so I can forget about what I have experienced.

The moral of the story?

If you live in Johannesburg, spend a night in a trauma unit in one of the city’s public hospitals. It will change you.

The rape kit and all other evidence associated with this case is “lost”. The ex walks free after bribing police.

The rape victim goes into hiding with her child on a family farm in some desolated, poverty stricken area outside Pretoria. A year later she is tested positive for HIV.

As I think of my night at Helen Joseph Hospital, I remember what author and former Umkhonto weSizwe bomber, Harold Strachan says of Australia: “It may be a lot easier to die in South Africa, but at least it won’t be of boredom.”