“We do what we can.”
“We do what we can.”
They come to hospital so late anyway, what can you do really? They are irresponsible, many of them. They know better, but our people refuse to take responsibility for their own health. And then it’s the government, the district, the minister, the president.
“We do what we can.”
“We do what we can.”
Again and again, I sing the words, repeat the speech, sometimes silently, sometimes violently. But when the (irresponsible?) mother of the (now dead) baby is running down the corridor, security behind her, Sister Agnes drawing up Valium, patients watching from their beds, mouths agape, and it’s your call, your shift, your patient, your incident, another death on your watch, the mantra does not work. The Gini coefficients, the shrinking economy, the legacy of apartheid, the unachieved Millennium Development Goals and human resource constraints, these are all disloyal friends who abandon you to face your conscience alone. You kill the patients alone. You kill them alone.
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Sometimes you turn your car around, call the referral hospital again. Maybe you will find bed A3 an ICU bed if you call just one more time. Sometimes you leave with packets of donor blood in your pockets that you forgot to drop off at the emergency department on your way out. Sometimes you accept a lift home, forgetting that you had driven in that morning.
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You learn a lot in the dead of the night: that if you cry while you are peeing, and hang your head between your legs, the tears collect in your eyelashes, so that when you walk back into the ward, there are no lines down your face but stars before your eyes.
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There is also a lot of good. Like the credit you get. That’s always good. And those moments when people try to explain medical stuff to you, like at the travel clinic, only to pick up the patient information card and flush with embarrassment at the “Dr.” beside your name. All of that is good. Letters in the post are always nice. Your electronic signature, that’s also nice, all of that is good. But there’s a lot of bad. Like when your tongue twists in your mouth and your neck turns round and round and round, making you want to scream but only knotting tighter each time you try. That sucks. And having to go back every day. That really sucks.
I tell Ma of the many horrific things our people overcome daily that go undocumented. I tell her that somebody must list them, all the bad things that are happening to them, to me, to us. Somebody needs to write them down.
Ma says I must leave them there, the patients. I must walk in their shoes, but try not to bring their shoes home. So I leave them there, stuck between the soiled sheets and the sandwich hidden for the day an appetite returns, between toilets caked in shit and the soap dispenser that only worked once, the day the minister came to visit. But I fail at walking in their shoes. They have no shoes, Ma. How can I walk in their shoes when they have no shoes?
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The people at Bible Study advise me to pray to Jesus for them. They ask for their names. They will email them around the church and the congregation will pray for them. They ask and they ask and they ask. “What are their names? We will pray to Jesus for them,” they insist. Names? Are these people stupid? How do they expect me to remember the names of hundreds of people crammed into a ward designed for a couple of dozen? How do they expect me to distinguish individuals among a sea of dying arms and mangled bodies glued to mangled beds?
And besides, Jesus wouldn’t get it. Jesus never failed at anything. He never did a thing wrong. That’s the fundamental difference. Having to live with failure will always set us apart from the Son of God. Having to live with the shame of not being better, not being courageous, not being great.
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Professor Siyatula didn’t warn us about any of this. When we were walking behind him on those grand ward rounds, hanging onto every word he spoke, fingers clutching at the hem of his garment, he, the only black specialist in a white institution, didn’t warn us about the suffering, the helplessness, the fear, the contempt that awaited us. There were no clues, no hints about just how bad things were going to be. We were doctors, mos. Well paid, well heeled. Was there anything we couldn’t handle?
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There are heroes. The ones with a skip in their step, the strange ones that don’t seem to need sleep, who walk around with irritating grins on their faces. But they are a minority. Most are broken and tired people, with bonds and university loans needing to be paid, so they stay on, doing what they can. I like to think I’m somewhere in the middle of that, but probably more broken than a hero.
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Were I at my best I could be great. The Charlotte Maxeke, Hamilton Naki, William Anderson Soga kind of great. But I am not at my best. I am tired. I have a ward full of patients and no anti-nausea medication I can safely take without developing extrapyramidal side effects, so I must chew gum through my six weeks of post-exposure prophylaxis and just suck it up. I have urine on my last pair of clean scrubs, because Dr. Voel-Vfamba asked me to drain a urine catheter bag and the valve got stuck, drenching me and my notes with body fluid. I cannot be great, even if I want to be.
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“Watch one, do one, teach one.” How many people did we kill monthly, weekly, daily, all in the name of learning? “Watch one, do one, teach one.”
I can’t tell you the number of times I
