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A mother who suffered a breakdown as she watched her little boy turn bluer and weaker over time and an elderly man who is constantly nauseous and feels “like I am being hit on the head with a hammer”.
These are just two of the many Nelson Mandela Bay state hospital heart patients desperately in need of the services of the defunct Provincial Hospital cardiac catheterisation laboratory or cath lab — a facility the Eastern Cape department of health has not managed to open in almost two years.
The cath lab debacle has dragged on since October 2018, when the facility was declared broken beyond repair.
And while health department spokesperson Siyanda Manana said this week the lab would be open again in October, Bay mother Elmarie van der Merwe Brynard said the pronouncement “means nothing to me any more. I am numb”.
Van der Merwe Brynard has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to keep her little boy Joshua, 6, alive — fighting the department at every turn in her desperation to have the lab reopened.
Joshua was due for another procedure at the cath lab in March but that, too, was postponed.
“Lately he has been seeming more tired and blue,” Van der Merwe Brynard said this week.
Without an angiogram, Joshua, who was born with serious heart defects, will not be able to have the heart surgery so crucial to his survival.
The lab is used to perform non-invasive procedures to fit patients with stents to open blocked arteries, fix arteries and congenital heart defects, and do some vascular procedures.
The use of the lab to correct certain congenital defects in babies’ hearts was pioneered by the dean of the Nelson Mandela University’s medical school, Dr Lungile Pepeta.
Van der Merwe Brynard has watched as at least five promises to reopen the lab were made with no result.
Manana said it would now only be reopened again in October, and blamed Covid-19 and the ensuing lockdown for the lack of progress in construction to repair the facility.
He added that priority cases were being taken care of through a contract the department of health had with the Netcare hospital group.
But for Uitenhage resident Zacharias Vorster, October is “too far”.
He needs an angiogram as a scan has shown some of his arteries are clogged, but the results were not clear enough for doctors to know what action to take.
Vorster, 68, said he had waited 140 days for the angiogram and was so weak he could work for only five minutes before needing to lie down.
His headaches have become so bad he feels as if he is being hit by a hammer.
