CHAPTER FORTY: Africa ASAP

I received the good news about Charmayne moving out when I returned home from a weekend with Allen.  Apparently, she was still afraid of the dog downstairs but, primarily, she couldn’t afford to pay the rent after all.  She was going to move back in with her mother.

I heaved a sigh.  This was just great!  I hadn’t received any rent for January and February, and now this?  Just what I had tried to avoid: searching for a new tenant in the winter.

My fears were borne out by the lack of response to the advertisement I immediately placed in the Schemmerhorn Gazette.  This might have been due to the fact that I was raising the rent from $450 to $475, hoping to recoup some of my losses. Or maybe because I began the ad by naming the street in an attempt to avoid hang-ups and loss of interest when callers heard the dreaded words, "Manson Street."

Anyhow, whether the season or the naming of the street was to blame, I only received a couple of responses, and no one was interested enough to look the place over.  For once, I didn’t really care; I had more important things to worry about after receiving a call at the office one morning from a frantic Wim. 

"You've got to come home!" he said, abruptly.  "Your father just called from South Africa.  Frederica's in the hospital.  She's dying!"

It took a moment for the words to sink in.  I could hear Mummy crying loudly in the background.

"Wh . . . what . . .?" I stammered.

"Your mother's flying to South Africa.  You'd better come home."  

I leapt up from my desk.  “I have to leave,” I told another secretary.  “I’m going to South Africa.  My sister’s dying.  Please tell the partners.” 

I had to run about ten blocks to my car, frantically puffing on the inhaler I carried with me for exercise-induced asthma.  Then I drove home along the Interstate at eighty miles an hour, flashing my high beams on and off.  Vehicles obligingly moved out of my way, probably thinking I was police or emergency personnel.  Luckily, I didn’t encounter any real cops. 

By the time I got home, Mummy’s sobbing had subsided a little. 

“I’m going to South Africa with you,” I announced as I burst through the door. 

“Really? Can you?” Mummy said.  “Oh, Stace, that would be lovely!  I really don’t want to go on my own.  We’re waiting for the travel agent to call back.”

“Well we’d better call and tell them there’s two of us now.”

In-between calls from Daddy and various travel agents trying to get us on the quickest flight possible, Mummy and I packed for the journey.  I chucked some jeans and tee-shirts haphazardly into a suitcase.  Aware that we might need to dress for a funeral, in unspoken agreement Mummy and I both added respectable, but brightly-colored, outfits.  There was no way we were going to wear black or some other dingy color to Frederica’s funeral.  She wouldn’t approve.  She was bright and vivacious, and if she had her say, would probably request reds and yellows, or bright purple: her favorite color.

We flew out of New York that night.  Mummy had a legal British passport; I still had my old British one, which was illegal but hadn’t expired yet.  I’d been an American citizen for five years now but somehow had never gotten around to applying for an American passport.  I didn’t know how the heck I was going to get back into the States, but I didn’t care.  The one question on my mind right now was whether Frederica could hold on until we reached South Africa.

Unfortunately, there were no direct flights.  We had to fly to London, spent the next day at my aunt and uncle’s house, and then catch another overnight flight to South Africa. 

When we finally arrived at Jan Smuts Airport two days later, the line of people waiting to go through Immigration was incredibly long. 

“It’s going to take us ages to get through that!” Mummy groaned.

“I’ll see if I can persuade someone up front to let us cut in,” I said. 

“You can’t do that!” my mother exclaimed in a mortified, but slightly hopeful, gasp.

I walked to the front of the line and addressed a huge Afrikaner standing there.  “Excuse me, sir.  I know this might sound rather unbelievable, but would you let my mother and I go in front of you?  My sister’s dying in the hospital, and we need to get there as soon as we can.”

“You’re kidding, raht?” the man said in a strong South African accent.

“No, really, I swear I’m not,” I told him.  “We’ve been traveling for two days from America.  We don’t even know if she’s still alive, but we need to get there quickly.  Please let us go ahead of you?”

I must have looked desperate, because the Afrikaner decided to believe me.  “Agh!  Go on then,” he said, “And if you’re telling the truth, I hope your sister’s aw-raht.”

“Thanks so much,” I said fervently and beckoned to Mummy, who was anxiously watching.  She hurriedly left her place in line and came to the front to join me, thanking the man with equal fervor.

The immigration official had overheard my conversation with the Afrikaner.  He looked at us with a look of suspicion on his face, but we were obviously distressed, so he decided we probably weren’t pulling a fast one.   He let us through the barrier and didn’t even ask us the standard question: “Did you got any dirty magazines?”

Daddy picked us up at the airport and drove us straight to the hospital.  The first question out of our mouths was: “Is Frederica still alive?”

“Yes,” Daddy said.  “It’s a miracle!  The priest came and give her the Last Rites, and the doctors were basically just waiting for her to die.  She was unconscious.  Then, yesterday, she suddenly woke up, looked around at us all and said hello! We haven’t told her you’re coming.  We thought it might worry her and set her back.  She’s been improving so much, though, that they’re even starting to talk about sending her down to Cape Town in a couple of weeks to go on the transplant list.”

Thank God! 

After this good start, the drive to the hospital rapidly descended into raging unpleasantness.  I started firing all sorts of questions at Daddy, and he got mad and yelled at me.  Then I yelled at him.  The next thing I knew, we were having a rip-roaring row at the tops of our voices.  I guess we were all upset. 

Mummy sat aghast in the back seat, faintly interjecting every now and then, “I don’t believe this!  I don’t believe it!”

The first thing we encountered in the cavernous first floor parking lot of the Johannesburg General Hospital was the elevator.  With filthy metal floors and walls, tattered refuse lying in the corners, it ground its way upwards.  As it finally shuddered to a halt, we felt as if we were about to step out into a decrepit tenement building, rather than a hospital.

Once a spanking new edifice perched high atop the crest of a hill, the “Jo’burg Gen” had obviously declined steadily over the years since I’d seen it last.  We walked into Frederica’s room, and I instantly burst into tears at the sight of her.  My vivacious, fun-loving, twenty-seven-year-old sister looked like a shrunken, bony old woman, bright yellow from jaundice and fighting for her life. 

A good-looking Afrikaner with blond hair, a tanned, weathered face and bright blue eyes stood up from where he was sitting at her bedside.  He introduced himself in a strong South African accent.  “Hi, I’m Janie (Pronounced Yah-nee), Frederica’s husband.”

We knew Frederica had recently married Janie, a close friend whom she'd grown closer to after Dan dumped her.  He'd offered to marry her when the adoption agency began threatening to take Shane away from her, due to her illness.  We could see by the way they looked at each other that their love was very real.

“Stace!” Frederica murmured weakly.  “What are you doing here!  And Mummy!  What a surprise!” 

A lot of tears were shed by my emotionally-soppy father and I at that bedside reunion.  We made up our fight a little while later in the hallway outside Frederica’s room.  Janie also proved to be a big softy.  He surreptitiously wiped his eyes, while iron-willed Mummy, veteran of  many years of keeping it all inside, held her tears in check once more to be strong for Frederica.

With few exceptions, the demeanor of the nurses was sullen and resentful.  They probably appreciated our continued presence at my sister’s bedside, however – I stayed all night, Mummy stayed all day – because it gave them less to do.  Indeed, I soon found myself running errands for most of the patients in the eight-bed ward.  I would take a bedpan here, a kidney bowl there . . . and soon learned to fake a false joviality to bow and scrape a smidgen of help out of the nurses.

Some of them didn’t seem so bad, their speech peppered with endearments, but their actions didn’t live up to their words.  The first day I was there, a couple of hefty nurses advanced on Frederica to give her a bed bath.  With much “Sorry, my babee” and “Apologiz, my dahling,” they proceeded to manhandle her so roughly that she screamed aloud in pain.  It was as much as I could do to stay seated behind the curtain drawn around the bed.  From that day on, Mummy and I took over the bed bathing.  The nurses soon grew familiar with the phrase from Frederica:  “My sister will do it.”

Bell pushes sprouted from the walls, out of reach behind each bed.  For many patients, the bells might as well have been on the moon.  Few of them worked anyway.  Feeble cries for help went ignored for such an inordinate amount of time that I found myself running out to the nurses’ station every now and then to report that a patient really was vomiting, or someone really did need her IV changed.

A poor woman lay dying of cancer in the corner of the ward, her body riddled with disease.  If she didn't receive morphine every two hours, she suffered excruciating pain.  On my first chair-bound sleep-over in the ward, the nurses forgot to give her morphine all night!  I wish I’d realized what her weak moans meant.  Her husband was distraught when he discovered the neglect, and from that point on a family member or friend (or myself, on occasion), stayed by her bedside to make sure the nurses dished out the morphine every two hours.

And woe betide if there was a particularly-stinky bed pan to be removed, rather than have it lie for hours at the foot of Frederica’s bed.  The nurses would sit rooted to their chairs at the nurses’ station, surreptitiously glancing at one another to see who was going to volunteer first, while I stood before them with the silver bowl.  Eventually, I just said, “Please take this bedpan” and plonked it down on the counter.  This proved a successful move in persuading the nurses to jump up and get rid of the malodorous thing.

One day, having had the gall to request two bedpans in as many hours, the nurses decided it was high time I was shown the sluice room.  I held my nose as I hunted around for a fresh bedpan that had the least amount of dried feces stuck to it.  Weren’t these things supposed to be sterilized?

The toilets for ordinary mortals were little better.  They smelt like a men’s room for hobos.  Judging from the burn marks all over the tiles, the “No Smoking” notice was a license for stubbing out one’s cigarette on the walls of the stalls.  Indeed an accumulation of elderly cigarette butts – stompies – moldered in the corners.  Some long-term patients informed us that the toilets were only cleaned about once a month.  Apparently, they were also B.Y.O. facilities because there was hardly ever any toilet paper or paper towels in evidence.  We grew used to the sight of people walking the halls carrying a toilet roll.  After complaining to a more-than-usually-conscientious matron, we managed to get the dispensers filled for a few days.  The ward was almost as filthy.  A cleaning crew came in once a day but seemed more interested in chatting than cleaning.  

On my first evening in Frederica’s ward, I noticed the first cockroach and speedily killed it.  As dusk approached, more and more of the loathsome things appeared.  They especially seemed to like the open medical waste container next to the sink, crawling in and out of it with gay abandon.  The container was aptly labeled “BUGBIN!”  No one seemed to use it, though, because used syringes were more often than not left lying around on bedside tables or on the floor.  I deposited quite a few in the Bugbin myself.

The next morning when the matron stopped by on her rounds, I commented on the cockroaches.

“I know,” she sighed.  “This place is infested with them.” 

To think that I’d been scared of cockroaches back in Schemmerhorn!  Now, hoping to catch a few winks on my overnight vigils, I was forced to resign myself to the hoards of bugs scuttling continuously across the floors and wall.  Trying to suppress images of cockroaches running over my face and getting stuck in my hair, I propped a pillow against said wall and closed my eyes to the gloom of the ICU.

A week later Frederica was moved to another ward, and there were at first no cockroaches to be seen.  My rejoicing in this fact lasted only until I needed to use the ward refrigerator.  I opened the door, and dozens of the little blighters scattered in the light.  Funny, I never saw any adult roaches in the fridge, which, among other things, held a stash of what looked like baby formula.  The room in which the refrigerator stood also happened to be the store room for drugs, syringes, and such, all being happily investigated by the baby roaches’ parents, come evening.

One day, there occasioned a pool of blood by Frederica’s bed.  The nurses looked at it and then proceeded to blithely walk in it, smearing it across the floor.  I was blowed if I was going to wipe it up.  It was fast becoming a game to see what tasks the nurses would and would not do.  Sure enough, the blood lay there until it dried.  The next morning, a cleaning lady was forced to scrub away most industriously at the damned spot, shooting venomous glances at me from under her brows all the while.

Later, Frederica had a mishap with her bedpan, resulting in a wet sheet.  To our dismay, there were no clean sheets to be had.  The nurses shrugged.  We would just have to wait.  We improvised, using a small sheet that had been wrapped around one of the pillows when the hospital ran out of pillow cases.

Frederica had been complaining for a few days about the sticky tape that held the central line in her neck in place.  Upon close examination, we discovered that the impossible-to-remove tape had been slapped on over a large lock of hair and across her earlobe, covering an earring.  This struck us as particularly amusing.  I struggled to hold the scissors still between giggles as I cut the hair away from her neck.

Shortly thereafter the nurses decided to change the death-grip tape.  After stripping it off, to a loud chorus of  Ouch-es from Frederica, they ineffectually dabbed at the sticky residue with some lotion.  When the lotion didn’t work, the nurses decided to try using ether, instead.  Now, as it happens, anesthetics are very dangerous for a person with liver disease because most of them are metabolized in the liver.  So, there lay Frederica, having almost died from liver failure a few days before, the nurses enthusiastically swabbing away beneath her chin with a large piece of ether-sodden gauze, telling her to, “Just turn your head, Honey,” and “Cover your nose with this, Sweetheart.” 

"This" was a mere Kleenex tissue: not an effective barrier against ether fumes.

Being ignorant of the dangerous effects of ether upon liver-disease patients, I was actually enjoying the pungent fumes that filled the ward.  Until Mummy walked in, that is.  She took one whiff and hastily shooed the nurses from the room, yelling in fright.  Then she wiped Frederica’s neck with a washcloth, and we all heaved a sigh of relief, none more so than Frederica, who was blue in the face from trying not to breathe in the fumes.

The dietitians also seemed to be trying their best to kill my sister.  She was supposed to be on a low protein/low sodium diet, but the kitchen was apparently never advised of this fact because they continually brought her foods containing tons of protein and salt.  Also, from having bleeding blood vessels in her esophagus cauterized every few days as her struggling liver caused back-ups and pressure, Frederica could only manage soft, mushy food.  The sight of a huge, tough, protein-filled steak moved us to another spate of giggles.  We kept sending the trays back to the kitchen, untouched, but they just kept right on coming.  We were forced to bring in food from home if Frederica was to eat at all.

In search of a microwave, Mummy attempted to brave the kitchenette.  It was guarded by bright-yellow louver doors and signs stating categorically AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!  The kitchen staff told her just as categorically to, “Get out of da keetchin!”  We had to resort to sneaking in when no one was there. 

Eventually, Mummy got the hell in and called the dietitian on the phone.

“The problem is,” the dietitian explained in a sugary-sweet voice, “we have low protein or low sodium trays, but not low protein and low sodium.”

“Can’t the kitchen combine some items from each onto one tray?” Mummy asked – a reasonable request, I would have thought.

“Oh, no,” came the reply.  “The food comes from our main kitchen, an hour’s drive away.  The kitchens here are only for warming things up.”

“So, what you’re telling me,” our seething mother snapped, “is that this hospital has no way to feed my daughter?!”

“That’s right,” admitted the dietitian in a shoulder-shrugging voice.

There followed some incoherent utterances from my usually-ladylike mother, during which time she accused the dietitian of killing patients.  She finally cut off the resultant indignant spluttering of the dietitian by slamming down the receiver.

The phone rang a few seconds later.  “Does this mean you’d like to file a complaint?” the dietitian asked.

“What do you think I’ve just been doing!” screamed Mummy in disbelief.  CLUNK went the receiver again.

When told of the affair the next morning, our conscientious matron readily agreed that the dietary department considered themselves a superior breed.  “We often have run-ins with them,” she sympathized.

That night, when I had to notify the nurses about a patient’s leaking IV, I found them in their chairs at the nurses’ station, heads on chests, snoozing away.  They started awake at my loud “Excuse me?” and fixed me with such baleful glares that I felt obliged to apologize for waking them.  Later on, unable to sleep, Frederica and the remaining two patients in the ward were chatting at 4:00 a.m. when a nurse came in and asked us to keep the noise down.  We were joking afterwards that we must have been keeping the poor things awake when one of the “poor things” stalked back in and told us very indignantly that the nurses did not sleep at night, regardless of what I thought I’d seen.  Rather, we had to be quiet because we were keeping the other wards awake.

The following night, however, the nurses were in very high spirits and kept up a constant, loud chattering, all night long.  When African women hold a conversation, they tend to shout at each other at point blank range: a very noisy business.  Being situated right next to the nurses’ station, we bore the brunt of it, but the noise could still be heard loud and clear at the far end of the hall.  None of the surrounding wards had a hope in hell of sleeping that night, but we didn’t dare ask the nurses to keep it down.

And so it went: two exhausting weeks of guarding Frederica, day and night, against the evils of the Jo’burg Gen.  An endless round of trying to get medication reordered that had been promised but omitted from the notes.  Trying to persuade doctors that the pain Frederica had been suffering in her back for a whole week must surely be something more than mere cramp from lying in bed so long.  Only after she eventually became delirious and was screaming in pain did they deduce that maybe she had a kidney infection.  She did, and by then it was so far advanced that we almost had to postpone her flight to Cape Town.

Luckily, due to fast-acting antibiotics, Frederica did make it to Cape Town with Mummy, Janie, and Shane in tow.  My last sight of her was when we hugged goodbye on the helicopter pad behind the hospital.  It was March 6th, the day before her twenty-eighth birthday. 

I headed back to the States the next day, armed with my certificate of citizenship and a letter from the hospital in the hopes of appeasing the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Department.  I endured a few scary moments of being eyed suspiciously by an I.N.S. official and was sent to sit in an empty office to await my fate.  Fortunately, the officer who eventually showed up turned out to be a kindly old soul who sympathized with my plight. 

“It might be a good idea to come into the States on an American passport in future,” he jokingly advised me with a kindly twinkle in his eye and waved me through into the United States of America (obviously pre 9/11).