Dying for nothing
A very good friend of mine hit rock bottom a few days ago. We all have our final straws and on this day the final straw for her was a story she’d just heard about a woman she knew.
The women went into labour and was taken to Bulawayo Central Hopital to have her baby. She’s HIV positive so the decision was made to give her a Caeserian Section (this lowers transmission rates from mother to child significantly). She had the operation at 3am.
A few hours later the woman’s husband, in a desperate state, called his employer to come to the hospital quickly because he needed financial help.
The employer arrived at about 8am and was told by the nurse that the woman needed a drip and there were none available in the hospital. Even more horrific, the couple had been told they needed to supply their own painkillers because there were none of those in the hospital either. The man’s wife had been in pure agony after surgery for 5 hours with no access to pain relief. Calling his boss was this man’s last hope.
My friend told me that the employer had been shocked to his core and had raced around town trying to find help in various shops and chemists, most of which stock very little now as a result of Mugabe’s price control policy. But by noon he had all that was required and got back to the hospital.
He was then told by the nurse that he needed to go out and get some food for them, because there was nothing available for patients to eat.
My friend said the woman’s husband told her that he had learned, through conversations with the nurses, that children, the elderly and very vulnerable people are dying in hospital of diarrhea complications because there are no drips. In other words, large numbers are dehydrating to death.
My friend said what shocked her the most, was the realisation that this woman’s horror story was actually a story about how lucky she was: she didn’t dehydrate to death in terrible pain.
October 11th, 2007 09:27
Good grief, why is nobody doing anything about this? The hypocrisy over Iraq is even more unbelievable in the light of stories like this - if anyone was a candidate for “regime change” it has to be Mugabe and his cronies.
October 13th, 2007 09:55
I am one of those forced to be in the diaspora so I can give my two sons a future. I am a nurse and it pains me to know how the ordinary person is suffering in a hospital where they go hoping to alleviate their suffering. It is not hard to have a working health system.It needs commitment, compassion and common sense. Zimbabweans are well kown for their compassion and commitment. Where is the common sense?All the highly experinced nurses have become professional slaves to other governments, all because common sense is dead.