Johannesburg - After spending two days at Steve Biko Academic Hospital under the scrutiny of medical students, Christopher Geyser has been sent home again, with the painful hernia he had been admitted for still hanging against his pelvis.
The 55-year-old homeless man on Tuesday said he had lost all hope and had realised no one wanted to take away the pain and misery he had endured for the past few years.
He had reported at the hospital early last Tuesday morning as instructed during his last visit to the hospital in May.
“At 10 o’clock I was seen by a doctor, who told me the operation would be on Thursday,” he said on Tuesday.
From then on he was put into a ward and subjected to examination by a steady flow of medical students. “When they were done I was told to get up and leave to be back at the end of July,” Geyser said.
This is the seventh time the hospital had failed to operate on him since the initial procedure to repair the broken tissue and muscle in May last year. He had had the hernia for six years when he went to the hospital in February.
Surgery was to have repaired the problem by pushing his insides back in and closing the opening. He was given a follow-up date, but every time he went back to the hospital he was turned away.
“I have been in so much pain. I cannot understand why they are refusing to help me when they know I have no other options,” Geyser said.
During a two-day stay in the hospital last September, surgeons described his situation as dire and said his right incarcerated inguinal hernia had put pressure on surrounding tissue. It had extended to the scrotum and caused pain and swelling, they said in papers seen by the Pretoria News.
The doctors, from the University of Pretoria, said a loop of his intestines had become trapped along the abdominal wall and caused obstructions, extreme pain and swelling. There was also strangulation of organs. There was an urgent need to fix the problem, the report from the specialists said.
But he was discharged from hospital with no action taken to repair it, and all follow-up visits have been the same.
Health Department spokesman Steve Mabona said last month the hospital would apologise to Geyser and attend to his problem urgently, but that has not happened.
Last week’s trip to hospital was the second since the undertaking from the department. “The pain is excruciating,” Geyser said. The hernia left him unable to walk properly. It was a source of great discomfort, with blinding pain shooting from its core whenever he had to exert himself, such as when he coughed and sneezed or relieved himself.
The department said on Tuesday that Geyser had to direct his complaints to the quality assurance office. “If not satisfied he should report to facility managers,” Mabona said
But all that has failed, Geyser said. It was clear they did not think much of him because he was homeless and that hurt him more than the hernia did, he said.
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Pretoria News