SOCCER WAS EVERYTHING!
Football was Ayanda’s life – until she fell during a game and ended up losing her leg. Now she’s being awarded costs
SHE dreamt of playing soccer for Banyana Banyana, running out in the green and gold with her name emblazoned on the back of her shirt, travelling the world, celebrating victories and despairing over defeat with her teammates.
But a career as a footballer will forever remain an elusive dream for Ayanda Mashilo. The 18-year-old lost her right leg when it was amputated in a bid to save her life six years ago – and making everything worse is the fact it all could have been prevented if she’d received proper medical treatment.
Missing hospital records, negligent treatment, blame shifting . . . It’s an all too familiar story in the South African health system – and Ayanda’s personal nightmare.
Her mother, Kristina, had to make the heartbreaking decision to allow her daughter’s leg to be removed when it became septic after numerous hospital visits.
Kristina (45) sued the Gauteng health department with the help of negligence lawyer Adele van der Walt, claiming her daughter would never have lost her leg if staff at Mamelodi Hospital in Pretoria had done their jobs properly.
It took five years for Kristina and Ayanda to get a court date but in the end it was worth it. The judge ruled Ayanda’s hospital records were conspicuously absent, which led to the inescapable conclusion they would have proved ill treatment by medical personnel.
The health MEC at the time, Lentheng Helen Mekgwe, tried to place the blame squarely on Kristina but Judge Annali Basson rubbished these claims as “insulting”.
The MEC also tried to place the blame on a private doctor who’d treated Ayanda but the judge was having none of that either.
The current health MEC, Dr Gwendoline Ramokgopa, and her department will have to pay the costs of the court proceedings as well as damages that will be awarded to Ayanda.
Just how much the young woman is entitled to will be determined in a separate court case due to start in September 2018, Van der Walt says.
But the current ruling is important, the lawyer adds. “It should help Ayanda and her mother come to terms with what happened.”
IT ALL started innocently enough: a fall during a soccer game in which Ayanda, then 12 and a skilled midfielder, hurt her knee. Playing for her side, Rethabiseng Leaders, in Bronkhorstspruit where she lives, she fell while battling for ball possession. At first she didn’t think it was too serious but after two days the knee was so painful she went to Bronkhorstspruit Hospital.
X-rays showed a fracture in her right kneecap and, after bandaging it, staff referred her to Mamelodi Hospital.
By that stage Ayanda was in so much pain she could barely sleep. She travelled the 35km to Mamelodi Hospital the next day – only to be told to come back five days later as there were no doctors on duty.
Desperate for help, Kristina, who works for a catering company, took her daughter to a private doctor who examined Ayanda and put her leg in a cast.
But the pain persisted and Ayanda was baffled. “Honestly, when you’re a soccer player you always fall, so I thought it was just a simple thing and I was going to be okay, I was going to get well. I didn’t think it could be this serious.”
And it got a lot more serious: her leg became septic.
She went back to Mamelodi Hospital, so ill she was slipping in and out of con-
sciousness. She finally woke up fully four days later – dizzy and disoriented – and it took her a few minutes to realise something had changed. She looked down and saw her leg was missing below the knee. “It was bad,” she says. But if it hadn’t been amputated it’s unlikely Ayanda would have survived – and she has her mother to thank for saving her life.
Kristina, terrified her daughter wasn’t getting the care she needed at Mamelodi, insisted on her being transferred to Steve Biko Hospital in Pretoria. She’d developed life-threatening sepsis and osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone.
It was her leg or her life. And although it was tough, Kristina didn’t hesitate: save my child, she said.
When Ayanda woke she was filled with despair. “It was hard,” she says. “I could walk and now I suddenly I had to adapt to using crutches. It wasn’t easy to accept.
“I was angry at my mother at first as she was the one who allowed them to do this. She signed off on the operation. But then I realised it was for the best – I could have died.”
OVERCOMING her confusion and anger took some doing, especially as it meant she’d never be able to play soccer again. “Other people just played soccer as a form of exercise,” she says. “For me it was everything. From the moment I first went onto the field I fell in love with it and I was, like, ‘ You know what, one day I’ll play in the big teams’. ”
It was tough returning to school – she was in Grade 7 at Rethabiseng Primary and some of her classmates teased her.
“They made fun of me, they didn’t understand. People were fixated on the fact I had only one leg. It wasn’t nice.”
Her siblings, Fridah (now 25), Phiwe (22) and Tshofelo (7), also found it hard to deal with their sister’s amputation. “They were shocked – it was hard for them to believe this had actually happened to me.”
Independently minded Ayanda struggled to ask for help.
“What I couldn’t do was ask people to do things for me, like to carry things for me. When I was rowing up my parents taught me to do almost everything for myself.”
Her journey to self-acceptance started in 2015 when one of her teachers, Felicia Mkhosi, told her about the Stellar School of Integrity, which offers a 16-month course focusing on building confidence, integrity, self-love and acceptance in teenagers.
Ayanda went on the course and hasn’t looked back. “It made me stronger and helped me heal,” she says.
“Before I pretended to be okay but I was hurting inside. Now I’m different. I’d feel sorry for myself and get angry and be, like, ‘Why would this happen to me? Why couldn’t it happen to somebody else?’ ”
Now she knows she isn’t defined by what people see but by what she feels inside and she knows she can live a full life.
Ayanda is now doing an IT learnership course at DVG Media Training in Kempton Park – which has facilities for the disabled – and is a boarder at the centre.
She’s come to terms with the fact she’ll no longer play soccer and has developed a love for other things.
“I love the idea of presenting on radio. One day I want to be one of the best presenters on stations such as Metro FM,” she says.
She also firmly believes dreams can change and the future can be rewritten.
“Even if you’re disabled you can still do something with your life. Go for it. Live!”