Death and dignity: How KZN strips
Terminally ill patients in the province have little access to pain relief, or basic care. Here’s one man’s story
Roxanne Premchund would sometimes hear her father scream. His cries were muffled by the loud gospel music coming from his room. But not enough to mask his desperate pleas.
Underneath the rhythmic melodies of praise, Premchund could hear her pastor-father imploring his maker.
“Why, God, why?” he would weep. “What have I done to deserve this?”
Pastor Lawrence Naidoo had moved into the spare room of his daughter’s Roodepoort home in Johannesburg shortly before being treated for cancer at Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital.
She explains: “My dad was a devoted Christian. He would never take God’s name in vain. But he cursed God then and he cursed himself. That’s when I knew how much pain he was in.”
Naidoo was diagnosed with stage two rectal cancer at Durban’s King Edward Hospital late in 2014 — there are four stages.
His chances of survival for the first five years after his diagnosis were about 90%, according to a 2016 study published in A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. But with the care Naidoo received, or its lack, he was soon to become collateral damage in KwaZulu-Natal’s failing health system — like many before him.
By the time the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) started investigating the state of cancer services in KwaZuluNatal in 2016, the province had only eight cancer specialists working in the public sector.
That situation has since worsened. By the beginning of February, KwaZulu-Natal had only two oncolo- gists working in public hospitals and three cancer machines to treat a population of more than 10-million people, according to a statement by the province’s health department. National Cancer Registry data show that in South Africa about one in eight people will suffer from some form of cancer during their lifetime. In KwaZulu-Natal’s case, that translates to about 1.3-million.
Public sector patients in the province wait an average of five months to see a cancer specialist and a further eight months for treatment, a 2016 SAHRC report found.
After 13 months of waiting, it’s often too late to be saved. Some patients die. Others, like Naidoo, would have to learn that their cancer had become much more advanced and far more complicated to treat.
By the time doctors at Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital decided on a treatment plan for him, Naidoo’s cancer had progressed to stage three. This had reduced his chances of survival to between 58% and 65%, the study published in A Cancer Journal for Clinicians study revealed.
When his family heard he would have to wait another seven months to start chemotherapy, they set out for Gauteng in search of better odds.
Premchund returns from the bathroom clutching a bunch of crumpled tissues. “My brother phoned me immediately after it happened. Everything just fell apart,” she says, drying her eyes.