MBOMBELA – Cut off from the world, orthopaedic patients lie in ward six of Rob Ferreira Hospital, awaiting operations.
“I don’t know what is happening at home,” said Mr Zacheus Mashego who recently spent his 40th birthday in hospital with a broken femur.
“My mother won’t tell me everything, she is afraid I will take pills to kill myself. I don’t know what is going to happen to my kids,” he said before starting to sob. Bedridden, he couldn’t walk away to cry in privacy.
Mashego was run over by a car on August 16. He described waking up in Rob Ferreira Hospital as Wrong Turn 7, or what should have been the seventh instalment in the horror-movie franchise in his view.
“This is hell. I don’t know how long I will still have to stay here.”
Mr Zacheus Mashego
According to the Department of Health, there is a backlog of 647 orthopaedic surgeries in Mpumalanga. To this end, treasury intends to provide the department with an additional R98 million in the adjustment of the 2015/16 budget. Of this, R38 million is to perform the surgeries.
In the meantime, Mashego had more questions that answers with his life in tatters. His two children at home in KaNyamazane are being cared for by his mother on her pension, since he, the breadwinner, cannot earn a salary. He underwent skeletal traction, to reduce the fracture, for 12 weeks.
Afterwards doctors told him the bone was no longer in a good enough condition to have a Steinmann pin inserted.
Mashego’s neighbour in the same ward, Mr Douglas Zuze (62), was discharged on November 13.
He sustained his femur break by also being run over by a car on August 5 on the R40 between White River and Mbombela when Zuze was crossing the road to Bundu Lodge where he worked as a security officer.
He told Lowvelder that operations planned for his broken femur and injured ankle had been postponed countless times. Eventually, on November 10, he had pins inserted into his ankle.
A few days later he was discharged, without the broken femur being fixed.
He was scheduled for a review yesterday, but at the time of going to print, he was still waiting to be seen by a doctor at the hospital.
The department didn’t provide clear answers to the newspaper’s questions. Spokesman Mr Dumisani Malamule didn’t say why Zuze had been discharged despite the bone in his thigh not growing back correctly.
Asked why Mashego’s femur has not been repaired, Malamule said, “Doctor assessment indicates the fracture is healing well, thus why he has been discharged a Steinmann pin was inserted as well on this patient (sic).”
It is little comfort for Mashego who is desperate. “Are they waiting for my leg to rot before they cut it off? I can be a cripple.”
• Mr Richard Fakude (36) continues to wait for hip-replacement surgery in Steve Biko Academic. Lowvelder previously reported how he had been a patient at Rob Ferreira for six months before being admitted to Steve Biko on September 18, where he was scheduled to undergo a hip replacement. He said he had still not undergone the operation.
The Gauteng Department of Health did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.
