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Sometimes I Think

Sometimes I think and nothing happens. That seems to happen a lot during this period of the second wave of Covid-19 that has hit my hospital. Netcare Kingsway Hospital is a community private hospital and has been overwhelmed in caring for patients with Covid-19.

Sometimes I think and something happens. That’s when a story takes shape and I wonder how I will tie it together to make it work.

Sometimes I think about the pandemic. I focus on the problems we face and work out solutions. I reflect on all we have done. I reflect on what we have learnt. Although we were all tired after the first wave, at least for the second wave we had systems in place. Systems to protect staff with PPE, systems to control the flow of patients and systems to deals with patients waiting outside and waiting for an ICU bed.

Sometimes I think that it is affecting everyone. It is affecting every nation. Uniting some and dividing others.

Sometimes I think that it is not only about the nurses and doctors and first responders. It is about the cleaners and security staff, about the porters and the kitchen staff. About the switchboard operator and the admission clerks. They are the ones that make up the scaffolding from which the nurses and doctors flesh out their caring and compassion. Without them risking close contact with sick patients health care workers could not do what they have had to do. 

Sometimes I think about the undertakers I see moving around the hospital. Death certificates in hand if they are lucky, otherwise their unfazed search for the source of that important document. I have seen families cry as a body has been transferred to the undertaker’s van. It was eerie to see a full length leg prosthesis pushed like a spare part above one body.

Sometimes I think about all of these people. I just have not written about them. Now I will write about them.

It may look like it’s only sometimes that I think about them. But today I walked out of my office holding a tray doughnuts. A patient brought them yesterday to celebrate his birthday with us. I didn’t save his life. I am just an orthopedic surgeon. I only fix bones as my clever anesthesiologist insists. I was grateful my patient thought of us but I never got round to having the doughnut.

Sometimes I think clearly. This time I took the doughnuts to the security guard that directs people in crisis to the back of the hospital for them to be triaged. He remains calm and polite and cares as much as any nurse or doctor. I know that because I see him every day he comes on duty. I wave as I drive in and he salutes me.

Sometimes I wish I could do more for them. The doughnuts for the security guard were a start.

Moving mannequins at a Durban outdoor market
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Conversations with My Grandfather

I do not remember either of my grandfathers. I am named after my mother’s father, Basil the baker. My father’s father, John, owned a corner café in Alberton. I can imagine he would be very proud that one of his grandson’s is an orthopaedic surgeon.

He would open the store early in the morning and close late at night every day of the week, closing only briefly for Sunday lunch. At lunch he would have probably told his children that they must study and become professionals. Become a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. Make money, but more importantly, have a life and be someone. Don’t slog all day behind the counter.

That is not why I became an orthopaedic surgeon, although one cannot discount the brainwashing effect generations of aspiration and desire to have children pass through university into a profession might have had. One cannot imagine their hunger for that, when they themselves had not even completed primary school and their dreams were vested in their children’s children.

If my grandfather was alive now as I write he would be opening the store. He would have woken up earlier, maybe at four or four thirty in the morning. He would not have had breakfast; perhaps he would have taken a cup of tea. Then he would have walked through the courtyard at the back of the house, down the steps, under the grapevine to open the store from behind. The back door opened into a kitchen, with a small veneered table with chrome legs. He might have taken his tea there.

My grandfather would be tired at the slog that faced him yet again. Worried about having to pay the suppliers, and calling in credit from customers who had no money but needed to pay. He would have been concerned about his daughter who was studying at university, who would later go on to become a lecturer. She was ahead of her time, but beyond vision for an immigrant from the dark days of Greece in the twenties and thirties.

If time and place were one, at the same time today I would be driving back from the hospital. I left at three in the morning after a call from my ward that one of my patients had died. He was only sixty, a pleasant Afrikaans gentleman that I had known as a patient for almost three years. A lecturer at the university. He had a knee replacement two days ago. Everything seemed to be going fine until I answered my phone this morning.

But today my grandfather would have me for company at five as I returned home. A specialist who earns money, has a life and is someone.  Today I was awake before him, and the price I pay to be honoured with my profession is beyond measure. How do I explain to him that I did everything right. That I am a good surgeon. That I care. That I had to phone my patient’s wife and tell her that husband had died, and she was alone from now on.

Wish that today my grandfather could make me a cup of tea at five in the morning, as he opens the store. Wish that we could compare notes about work.

Neither of us have any idea of what it is to wear the shoes that take us to work each day.

My shadow taking making a picture in the Namib Desert