Cape Town -
I hate being shouted at. Always have.
When a large and very loud nurse shouted at me to wake me up, I was unhappy.
I was unhappy anyway. I had been transferred from Groote Schuur to DP Marais chest hospital much against my wishes. I had a room to myself with its own bathroom at Grotties. That helped a bit.
And now I was terrified in a new and strange hospital, with people shouting at me.
I went to hospital with heart disease and wound up discovering I had TB – and multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) at that.
So a large sister shouting at me in what seemed like the middle of the night was a bad start to the day.
What made matters even worse was the drug regime. I’ve never favoured psychotropic drugs – the boldest I’ve ever been was occasional dagga – and the TB drugs are the real deal. You get seriously stoned, forget things like your name, have mild hallucinations, stare mindlessly into the middle distance, think up strange thoughts and then forget something else. That people should do this for recreation is bewildering.
And now I felt like I was in a hole being shouted at and told to get up. Unhappiness, terror, stoned – a very bad combination. To that, add illness. TB is not like flu. It made me weak as a kitten – I was confined to a wheelchair for a while before graduating to a Zimmer frame and then my own feet. People who might believe that you should just get over yourself don’t realise quite how sick you feel, how tired you are all the time. And how the medication bashes you.
The shouting sister turned out to be a sweetie, but I wasn’t to know that then. I’m sure I whinged, which is a bad strategy with a large and loud nurse. She prevailed. I was introduced to hell.
I’ve been healthy all my life, despite my best efforts.
Now I was very sick. I felt like I was dying. I was dying. Of the three other people admitted to DP Marais with me on that day, I know two have died. I came close to death a few times, I was told, mostly cheerfully. I suppose survival is more heartening to medical staff than a stiff.
In my first few days at DP Marais I was with the very sick; then I graduated to the walking very sick and finally to the recovering sick. The rewards of this last status were substantial: you got to make your own bed and so wake up an hour or more later.
The main advantage is feeling like you can again gaze upon the world and not feel like sleeping all day. Some of the healthier patients spent all day sleeping anyway.
Mostly, life was desperately boring. Don’t believe it is a chance to catch up on all those books you’ve been meaning to read for ever. It isn’t. I struggled to concentrate for more than a few pages at a time and, by the time I went back to the book, often as not I’d forgotten the plot thus far.
Writing was worse. In my arrogance I believe I am a fluent and precise writer. Alas, my spelling disappeared and my grammar was no more. Mostly I wrote nonsense although being stoned helped a bit with poetry. I also wrote a lot of lists about things I wanted to eat. When I ran out of things after “first course – oysters” – I knew it was time to stop this foolishness.
Most of the day was spent staring at nothing in particular, so when five guinea fowl chicks hatched it was a cause of great excitement, for me at least. One died within a couple of days, but the remaining four were a source of some interest. First, I had to check in the morning that no homicidal cat had got them in the night. Then I had to check at the end of the day that they had survived.
Survive they did. Guinea fowl chicks start flying after a few days. I thought I was hallucinating when this little bird flew on to the back of a bench. I wasn’t. Within a couple of days, they were flying into a tree to roost. At mealtimes, when the leftover rice or samp was scattered on the grass, these chicks held their own, beating off their adults and pigeons although they were still covered in fluff.
Birdwatching is fun, but a day, a week, a month looking at guinea fowl and flying rats and somnolent sacred ibises is a bit much. Excitement, when it came to me, was no fun at all.
I used to like bananas a lot, and ate on average two a day. A big contribution they make is to prop up your potassium level, which is apparently a good thing. On one occasion, though, blood tests indicated that I was short of the stuff, so I was put on a drip “just for a day”. One day became two and I started to feel weird. The nursing staff insisted I persist. By day three, I had had the drip and heaven knows how many potassium tablets. I was stuffed, well and truly banana-ed out.
I then had a psychotic episode. I have no clear memory of what happened, but fellow patients were eager to tell me later. I was in the getting-better ward and feeling quite good, but on that night I rose and lectured all the inhabitants about life and death.
As I was coming out of Banana Land, I do remember another patient suggesting I take my 62 years to bed and allow them to sleep.
A nursing sister came and urged me to sleep. I said I couldn’t and burst into tears.
So I was sent to Groote Schuur the next morning, bemused about almost everything. It certainly put me off bananas for good.
Sunday Argus