Puddle of puss in surgical ward
The scent of faeces was overpowering. My colleague pulled her shirt over her nose in an attempt to escape it.
Walking up to Witbank Provincial Hospital’s entrance was like walking through a maggot-infested pit of human excrement.
The scent of faeces was overpowering.
My colleague pulled her shirt over her nose in an attempt to escape it.
“Don’t breathe through your mouth,”
I whispered to her,
“it’s worse when you can taste it.”
The air was foul with the smell of sewage, as 10 meters away from the hospital’s entrance a man was working on an underground pipe that can only be assumed to be part of the waste management system.
The buzzing flies seemed to keep rhythm to a faint gospel song carried to the entrance on the wind.
Once inside, the open windows due to the lack of an air-conditioning system, served as the perfect conduit for the smell of faeces to follow us through the halls.
I stumbled, my foot caught momentarily in what can only be described as a “pothole”, an area of the floor that had just seemed to disintegrate with time.
“I’ve been here for two weeks and I’m scared that I might die,” Mrs Cynthia Meijer* said, tears streaming from her eyes as she lay in a dirty bed, in a dirty ward, amongst strangers who didn’t seem to care for her.
The nurse had just come around to clean her wound; which resembled a bubbling black tar pit.
The linen and floor were covered in puss from where her wound’s drainage pipe had leaked.
Mrs Meijer had been admitted to hospital on January 1 with a suspected blockage of the intestines.
Shortly after first being admitted, she underwent the first exploratory surgery of her abdominal cavity where after she was told that she might have a form of cancer, but that the doctor couldn’t say for certain until the test results came back.
Two days later, Mrs Meijer was opened up again in an attempt to get clarity about what ails her.
Still, there was none to be had.
“It’s been two weeks and I still don’t know whether I have cancer or not,” Mrs Meijer stated, her voice trembling, “but it’s not just that I don’t know what’s wrong with me; the conditions that all of the patients here have to endure are the real tragedy. When I tell the nurses I’m in pain, they just laugh at me. I only get my medicine twice a day; at 22:00 or 23:00 at night from the nurses working nightshift, and then only again when dayshift comes in.”
Mrs Meijer’s arms are full of bruises; “this is the result of the nurses trying to put me on a drip. I don’t know why they bother – they never hit a vein, and the IV bag is almost always empty.”
The flies are buzzing around us now; sitting on Mrs Meijer’s hairy legs.
“You have to excuse how dirty my feet are and how long my leg hair is,” Mrs Meijer explained shyly, “I haven’t been able to have a bath or been bathed since I was admitted. It’s been two weeks. I can’t have a shower, no matter how badly I want one, because there is no water in this ward.”
In disbelief I turned open the tap at the foot of her bed. Nothing. Not even the hissing of a memory of water.
“The toilets are a nightmare too, as you can imagine,” Mrs Meijer said, “they don’t flush because there’s no water. There’s not a single toilet on this ward that flushes. They’re all full of faeces and urine, and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone except the patients. There is supposed to be a bucket for us to flush with, but it’s never there. It’s a miracle that they can make food for the ward with this lack of water…” Mrs Meijer shifted her eyes downwards before quietly confessing; “not that I’ve been able to eat in a while. I can’t eat the normal menu given to the patients here because of the exploratory surgery done on my intestines. I need to be on a liquid or soft food diet… but I only saw the dietician for the first time earlier today. She said she’d work out a menu for me… Hopefully she’ll bring me some juice or something for lunch.”
As we were conversing a man pushing a Checkers trolley full of snacks and cooldrink came buy, selling the bounty between the trolley’s bars. Mrs Meijer bought a bottle of water for R10.
“If I don’t buy it, I won’t have anything to drink. I don’t get given water when I ask the nurses for it. I asked them to wet my washcloth for me a while back so that I could at least wipe myself down, but even that is asking too much.”
Seeing the look of horror on my face, Mrs Meijer hastened to add,
“You think that’s bad? I struggle to sit up or walk on my own because of the surgery and general pain in my abdomen, “yesterday I had to give up on going to the bathroom in the toilet because I was only strong enough to make it to the ward’s door; and not to the toilet down the hall. The only person that offered to help me is the old lady on the other side of the ward, she’s probably about 80 years old and a patient herself. The nurses all saw what was happening, and I did ask for assistance, but I got none. Eventually I just hobbled back to my bed. I’ve asked them to put the catheter back in; but they wont even do that. Now, when I really can’t hold it any longer, I pee in the dustbin next to my bed. I try not to have to resort to this because it’s usually filled with paper towels covered in my own puss that have been thrown away by the nurses… Plus they just make me clean it myself afterwards anyway.”
“I’m so scared and I don’t know what to do,” Mrs Meijer wept, “one of the nurses on this ward walks around and sings ‘I can see you, you can see me, I don’t want to hear you.’”
* Names changed to protect the identity of informants.
