The Surgical Patient

While waiting for my husband to come collect me, a nurse asked a patient’s mother if she could speak Afrikaans, to go assist a gentleman in another ward…

As we were paying for my medication, the woman came out, telling us that her Afrikaans is actually not that great.

Then, we heard the nurses telling the man that he should have had a driver picking him up we signed for, and that he should not leave. He was insisting. So they begged him to at least wait till their shift was over so they could walk with him to the bus stop. He refused. We asked the nurses where he lives, because I told my husband, “ I’m so dizzy, there’s no way this man will be safe in my state, walking to a bus stop and climbing on etc.”

They said he lived in Atlantis- a mostly Coloured area further away than our home is. We offered to take him to the bus stop in our area..but as we drove, we felt he should just be taken all the way to Atlantis, so they dropped me off (sitting was SORE!) and kept on driving.

So, this man has seven children. He lives with his children and his grandchildren. He works in a factory and he was about to go to work! That’s why he didn’t want to wait for the nurses to finish their shift! He said he’d asked them for written evidence of his surgery to go and show his boss to thereby ask for the night off, but the nurses apparently told him, “We don’t have paper here.”

If we’d known, we’d have tried to insist on SOMETHING! And they’d cut our identifying bracelets off so he didn’t even have that. He was there for a urethral procedure so he couldn’t exactly show his boss… Hw said that his boss fired people for bringing evidence late, and the nurses had told him to go back the following day for a doctor’s note – too late for him. So he was going to work… Dizzy. In pain. To keep his low paying job.

He refused to be taken all the way to the town his job is in, said my husband had already done too much, so he dropped him off at the Atlantis bus station.

Life is hard. You’re desperate. If you don’t work, none of you will eat. And so, you force yourself to go to work the very day you’ve had surgery. It’s as if apartheid hasn’t ended. He lives far away in the Coloured area, and has the kind of job set up for Coloured people, is oppressed at work and there’s no hope of an improvement in his lot.

Sobering.