Bed-ridden for 8 years

PATRICIA MAGANU
Staff Writer | Monday June 21, 2010 00:00

 

At the family home in Tonota last week, the woman's mother still hoped to see her daughter walking independently.  Doctors told the parents in 2007 that their daughter would never recover.

The bed-ridden Gontlafetse has been in hospital since December 4, 2002 when she gave birth. She has never met her daughter.

Arriving at the Sevela's home, an eight-year-old child sat on the ground in front of a small hut doing her homework, while the old lady rushed to fetch garden chairs.

She is Gontlafetse's daughter named Tlamelo.

Though she has never met her mother she knows exactly who she is as she keeps asking if 'we are from the hospital'.

Gontlafetse's mother, Mary Sevela, says the little girl is afraid to go and see Gontlafetse because of the tube that is supporting her life.

'She does not like going there because she is afraid of her,' she says.

According to Mary, she left her daughter after a successful caesarean operation and went home only to find her in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) the following day.

'I did not know how to react when I found my child on life support,' she says.

In 2006, Mary was advised to take her daughter home and she said she was shocked because she did not know how she would handle a patient with so many complications on a life support system.

Mary says she wants her daughter to come home walking the way she did when she went to Nyangabgwe Hospital back in 2002.

'I am struggling with these people at the hospital because I want my daughter to come home walking as she was when I took her there to have her baby,' she says.

Mary says she has consulted with her parliamentarian to plan a meeting with the hospital management. 'They told us that we have to take the child, but we are not going to take her in that condition because the hospital is responsible for her being like that,' she says.

Gontlafetse's father, Sevela Tsiolo, says that Gontlafetse is his only daughter with one brother.

He says he knows it is impossible, but he wishes to see his daughter coming home as a normal person.

'I want my daughter back walking the way she was, but that might not be possible so I don't know what I'm going to do because it is very difficult for us. She is our only daughter and we need her back,' he says.

He further says that it is hard for them to give up on their daughter because she is still alive though it seems like she has been dead for eight years.

Gontlafetse is in the gaenecology ward at the NRH.

Tsiolo says he wishes the hospital would own up to the mistake, but they will not. He firmly believes that the operation had something to do with her daughter's condition.

'My daughter did not have BP,' he says.   In the past, the parents were told that NRH management investigations cleared the hospital of any negligence.  The hospital officials say she got into this condition because she has high blood pressure.  The hospital superintendent will not be at Nyangabgwe for the rest of June and all of July, the public relations officer says.