ZOLELWA SIFUMBA
It took a serious battle with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDRTB) for Zolelwa Sifumba to find her voice, but now she wants to keep up the fight for the mental health needs of doctors and healthcare personnel to be met in the workplace.
Sifumba always dreamt of becoming a doctor. “I started medical school in 2009 at the University of Cape Town but I have always struggled with mental health issues. I was suffering from depression and, in my fourth year, when we started doing clinical work, it got worse. I started seeing a psychologist,” she said.
“In the same year I discovered a lump in my neck and I was diagnosed [with] MDR-TB. I remember when I got the test results I still said: ‘Sorry, what?’”
“If anything I learnt that day how you should deliver bad news.”
She explained that at the time the survival rate for MDR-TB was about 40%. “I assumed I was going to die.”
Then one day she heard that an organisation, TB Proof, was speaking on campus. “I ran down there to listen and they were amazing. I joined their cause to get support for my own treatment journey. They later gave me an opportunity to speak. I was so shy,” she said.
But she summoned her courage and started talking about the disease.
Sifumba said while she was undergoing the gruelling treatment for MDR-TB, she kept herself going by attending conferences and doing advocacy work nationally and internationally for TB Proof.
“Suddenly the health system made more sense to me coming from the other side,” she said.
After she completed her degree, she was sent to a rural hospital in KwaZulu-Natal to do her internship.
“It was rough,” she said. “There was a lot of bullying. I was in an accident once after working a 36-hour shift. When Covid-19 hit us I was being bullied for speaking up and asking for personal protective equipment [PPE].”
She also got Covid-19 but has recovered. “Afterwards I had a nervous breakdown. My anxiety went through the roof. You looked at the PPE they gave us and you know they sent us trash. We needed more support.
“I had a tough journey to where I am today. It should not have to be this hard. Last year was just hellish,” she said.
She has left her job as a doctor for now to recover.
“I wanted to scream fire at the frontline. I want to have a global impact,” she says of her plans to speak out against bullying at hospitals.
“Doctors are forced to work 36-hour shifts. But who can make a good decision after 36 hours?” she asked.
“On social media people are so fond of portraying health workers as superheroes but nobody checks on a superhero. But they are just human. And most of us have seen way too much death,” she said.
Dalene von Delft from TB Proof said Sifumba was an amazing TB advocate. “She started her own blog, TB and Me, even before we met. I was very impressed from the start about the way she could share her story. She was very engaging,” Von Delft said.
Sifumba has taken part in a documentary on TB and has represented TB Proof internationally. “I can see she has a real need to help others.”