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The Ocean

I wrote this poem a few months ago at the end of summer…..


As the world

Unfolds and bursts

Where seams

Never existed

I crawl to the ocean

In the darkness

Leaving it all behind

Summer does not

Seem to want an end

If only other things

Would end as well

Clear skies echo

The Ocean quiet

Our windless Halcyon


I lie in bed

Exhausted yet

Today I contributed

My life’s tapestry

Is richer in this dark hour

As I watch sea and sky

Posted on by basilBLOGinc · 5 Comments

A Note for Future Generations

Covid-19 is still with us. The South African curve is not flattening, and the number of new cases and deaths continues to rise.

I am seeing my first Covid-19 positive patient at Netcare Kingsway Hospital.  He is fortunately well. Unfortunately the surgery for his broken arm will be delayed for two weeks. I am not prepared to risk spreading the New Corona Virus in my theatre if it can be avoided. This said, if we needed to operate my team would do it safely.

I have consulted and seen other patients with Covid-19 before our hospital was closed and then reopened last month. But they had been admitted under other physicians, and were not strictly my responsibility. Although ownership may be a better word. We bear great responsibility as the doctors of these patients.

I was prompted to write this piece by Laurel Braitman, a professor and the Director of Writing and Storytelling at the Stanford School of Medicine at Stanford University. She hosted an emotional online writing workshop this weekend. The prompt was to write something for a  time capsule that would be opened by future generations. 

Back to my patient:

He was the last patient I saw on my ward round. 

First I see green patients, then yellow patients, and finally the red patients. Negative swabs, awaiting swab results and positive swabs respectively. 

Besides being red my patient is also black,  and I am white. Yes I notice that. Especially after all the other colors in my hospital. We are both born in the same country, but we come from different cultures.  We are the Rainbow Nation. Diverse and rich in color and ethnicity.

Our categorization of the disease in South Africa is also divided into race, as it has become all over the world. Black and white. I say this with great respect as America burns with human rights protest.

To save on PPE (personal protective equipment) I took him his breakfast. This meant a nurse would not have to don a special N95 mask, visor, gown, apron, hood, booties and gloves. No more pleasing hostess serving patient’s food on a tray with plates and cutlery in the hospital. Just a polystyrene container with food heated in the microwave. Delivered by an already tired doctor.

South Africa has always had constraints, and we all live in fear of not having enough PPE. So being able to serve the patient his food was my way of saving PPE for the tsunami we are expecting. It also allowed me to connect with him. I had to explain the delay in surgery. I reassured him that it was not going to jeopardize the ultimate result and clinical outcome of his injury. We also spoke about his work. His family. And Covid-19. We are all facing the same storm, yet each of us is in a different boat. 

Then my ward round was over. I spent thirty minutes with the nursing team going over the donning and doffing processes to be sure they were safe. Then I changed in the large change room the hospital has created for staff dealing with Covid-19 patients. I changed from hospital scrubs back into the new scrubs I wear to work every day. 

At home, after a  shower, I changed out of those scrubs into shorts and a t-shirt, and started my sanitized day.

Thank you to Laurel Braitman for the inspiration.

Durban beach baptism
Posted on by basilBLOGinc · 6 Comments

A New Sense of Responsibility

Surgery is a privileged profession in so many ways. But under the cloud of Covid-19 I discovered a new profound privilege.

I had to operate on a 16 year old girl. She had injured her knee before lockdown and we had planned a knee ligament reconstruction. She was due to come into Kingsway Hospital with her mom and be treated with care and attention in our orthopedic ward.

We had to delay surgery because of lockdown. Then the hospital closed and re-opened, and at last we were able to schedule surgery for this past Saturday.

Surgery is not about the incision. It is about the healing: people entrust their bodies to the surgeon to remove, repair or relieve. There are moments on the path that the surgeon and patient walk that stand out. There is the introduction, understanding who they are and what they want to become. Assessing them clinically and then interpreting the investigations. Discussing options and guiding them to what you believe is the correct choice. Then the surgeon has to engage about the details and obtain consent. The capacity to make choices about your body, even as a child, is enshrined in our constitution, so it is good to engage with minors although their guardians have to sign the consent.

I had an new responsibility on Saturday. In the consultation we had decided that her mother would not come into the hospital with my patient. It would be an additional cost for her mother to be tested for Covid-19, and there was also the small risk of possible exposure. 

It felt awkward at the time to exclude her mother from her hospital admission. She would be in hospital for a little over 24 hours. Even so, I had never done this before. 

That meant my patient was taken to the front entrance of my hospital by her mother. There she would be left to enter alone with a clerk showing her the way to the ward. 

This whole thing had been preying on my mind for days. 

I saw her pre-operatively in the ward. She was alone in a normally occupied three bed ward. As  healers we have had touch taken away as part of our skillset  by this virus. Our faces are guarded by plastic visors and hidden by masks. Intonation and smiles are lost, and breathing and speech is difficult. Communication fails even though the need to care is heightened.

Over the years I have had children with injuries whose parents have given telephonic consent for emergency procedures to be performed. So seeing a teenager alone in bed was not something unusual. Yet the knowledge that her mother would not be allowed in as we had decided not to have her tested for Covid-19 meant that my patient was alone because of new policies and requirements to contain the possible spread of the disease.

I felt a sense of loss in that some of the humanity of my profession was gone. When she was wheeled into my operating theatre I realized I was entirely responsible for her. She was in my care in a manner beyond my commitment to my patients before this pandemic.

It was a new sense of responsibility. It was almost as if she was my child for that moment.

Antarctica is the only continent free of Covid-19.