On December 5 at 16:00 *Mrs Gracie Kerns arrived with her daughter, *Mrs Susan Coombs at Witbank Provincial Hospital.
Mrs Kerns had been vomiting uncontrollably for three days by the time she eventually made her way to seek medical assistance.
An ambulance had to be called to transport Mrs Kerns to the hospital due to her frailty.
Nearly exactly 12 hours after Mrs Kerns had arrived at Witbank Provincial Hospital, at approximately 04:00, she was finally able to see a doctor.
“The ambulance that took her to hospital was in a terrible state,” Mrs Coombs, Mrs Kerns’s daughter, explained; “the doors didn’t close. They’d apparently been kicked off of their hinges by a previous patient. The stretcher was also problematic as it wasn’t very manoeuvrable and lead to us having to shuffle my mother around the house to get her to the stretcher.”
Mrs Kerns was admitted due to her condition, but was discharged the very next day.
A week later Mrs Kerns’s condition had worsened.
“My mother came to wake me up to tell me that she was ill. She never wakes me up for anything,” Mrs Coombs said forlornly.
Another ambulance had to be called to fetch Mrs Kerns from her daughters house in Extension 41.
“It was still broken when it got here,” Mrs Coombs stated.
Mrs Kerns was admitted to Witbank Provincial Hospital again where she was allegedly told that they needed to perform blood tests; but that they were unable to because they didn’t have water.
“I’m not even sure how that works,” Mrs Coombs lamented, “but shortly thereafter I was called to one side by my mother’s doctor.
He told me that she needed an operation, but that she was currently too weak to operate on.
He told us that they would need to keep her there until she was stronger before they could do anything for her.
The next day they started giving her plasma and the day after that I got a call from my mother’s partner… He told me they were preparing her for surgery.
They didn’t let me know at all, despite my name and contact details having been taken down as my mother’s contact person. After the operation, the doctor came to speak to me and explained that they fixed a hernia but that they also had to remove a part of her stomach.
On December 26, nine days after Mrs Kerns’s operation, Mrs Kerns was discharged once again.
“I asked them not to discharge her,” Mrs Coombs explained, “There’s no one at home to look after her. I leave at 06:00 for work every morning and only get home late. My husband is a paraplegic himself and can’t even access my mother’s room from his wheelchair. Plus, I don’t know the first thing about nursing or wound care! I work in security! They sent her home with 12 band-aids and a box of drainage band-aids. After I took her home, I drove to the hospital and had a chat with her doctor; explaining the circumstances to him. He told me to bring her back to the hospital, which I did. She was readmitted upon arrival at the hospital. I accompanied her to her bed in the surgical ward when suddenly I was stopped in my tracks by a male nurse who wanted to know why I had brought my mother back. I explained to him that I was having trouble with wound care, to which he replied ‘What do you mean? It’s as easy as one-two-three.”
After Mrs Kerns’s readmission, a junior surgeon approached Mrs Coombs;
“She explained the circumstances surrounding my mother’s health; her very low blood pressure, the septic wounds and heart failure. She told me, ‘I’m just telling you so that if anything happens to your mother you can’t blame anyone.’ Thereafter a social worker from the hospital came to see me and asked why I refused to take my mother home. I explained to her again that there would be no one at my home to take care of my mother for most of the day; and thus due to her immobility this wouldn’t be practicable.”
Mrs Kerns was discharged against her daughter’s wishes again.
Mrs Kerns was so gravely ill at this point that Mrs Coombs had to pay a private ambulance to fetch her at the hospital and bring her home.
“They just removed part of her stomach; but the only pain medication that she was prescribed was Painblok; which similar to Grandpa powder in strength and efficiency. When my mother got home, she was covered in bedsores – bedsores her nurses hadn’t known about, leaving me to suspect that they didn’t change the sheets even once during her stay.”
Mrs Kerns is currently still at home with her daughter.
She is slowly but surely regaining her strength, though her daughter is still concerned over the surgical incision which has yet to heal.
*Names changed to protect the identity of informants.
*No feedback had been received from the Department of Health before going to print.
