R11.6m awarded for botched birth

05.06.2012 The son Fuki Skhosana, Ntokozo, plays soccer with his friends at Zenzele Mayfield. The mother of the 8 year old boy who suffers from cerebral palsy, shares her side of her story at her house as the Health Department will be paying her R11,6 million for damages done on her son during birth. Daveyton. Picture:Itumeleng English

05.06.2012 The son Fuki Skhosana, Ntokozo, plays soccer with his friends at Zenzele Mayfield. The mother of the 8 year old boy who suffers from cerebral palsy, shares her side of her story at her house as the Health Department will be paying her R11,6 million for damages done on her son during birth. Daveyton. Picture:Itumeleng English

Published Jun 6, 2012

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She is only 35 years old, but Fuki Skhosana has been through a lot.

In 2004, a doctor at Far East Rand Hospital botched the delivery of her son who was left brain-damaged.

Skhosana left her job to be his main carer, knocking on many hospital doors, requesting help for her son. She also fought a legal battle against the Gauteng Department of Health, wanting compensation for what had been done to her son.

Her efforts and sacrifices finally paid off and on Tuesday the department paid her R11.6 million.

While happy that the money will finally make life better for her family, it has been a long and difficult road for the Daveyton woman.

A year-and-a-half after Ntokozo was born, his father – unable to accept that the hospital had ruined their child’s life – refused to accept responsibility, leaving them to deal with the consequences on their own. He then died of a heart attack.

While Skhosana was dealing with taking care of a disabled child and the death of her partner, her mother died in 2010.

With no job or partner to help her, Skhosana had to raise Ntokozo and his 14-year-old brother on a R1 400 government grant.

Today, Ntokozo, 8, limps and does not have balance. He falls and his body is bruised and scarred. He can’t walk for long distances and Skhosana has to carry him sometimes. His left hand does not work and eating is difficult.

“He can’t speak properly. I have to bathe and dress him. I have to buy him trousers with an elastic waist so he can undo them himself when he goes to the toilet. When he eats, it’s as if he can’t close his mouth, so food comes out all the time; it’s always a mess where he eats. He is slow at school and if a pencil is on a table, he will struggle before he can pick it up and grip it properly.

“It’s tough to live with a child like Ntokozo. But it is better now; it was much harder when he was younger,” Skhosana said.

After all that she went through, Skhosana is looking forward to a new life for her and her children. Currently she lives in a tiny three-roomed shack. Ntokozo and his brother sleep in a tiny windowless room that has twin beds.

They use a pit latrine and walk 3km to get water.

She wants a house that has a garage and is closer to Ntokozo’s school in Brakpan, a car to ferry Ntokozo around in, which she will also use to attend meetings at his school, which normally happen at night.

“One day I had to sleep at the train station after a meeting, as the last train had left,” she recalled.

She will also use the money to take Ntokozo to specialist doctors, especially for his speech and arm, which Skhosana hopes will function properly one day.

According to Skhosana, Ntokozo’s condition is the result of a doctor who refused to perform a Caesarean section, even though her baby was big and the nursing sister attending to her said she should.

“She told the nurses that she had studied for seven years to be a doctor and knew what she was doing.”

Skhosana said the doctor had forced her to push, slapped her, inserted fingers in her roughly and even sat on top of her stomach, trying to force the baby out. The nurses who witnessed the assault by the doctor fled the ward and did not even rescue her when she screamed for help, she said.

After four hours, in which Skhosana’s voice had died from crying from the assault and the rough use of forceps and the vacuum by the doctor, the baby finally emerged.

However, Ntokozo was green and blue and had bruises all over the body from the forceps, even under one of his eyes. His left arm was limp and bruised because the forceps had severed a nerve.

The doctor, Skhosana said, now works in a KwaZulu-Natal hospital “where she continues to butcher people”.

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The Star Africa

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