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A week in QECH’s Ward 3B

The entrance to QECH’s AETC
The entrance to QECH’s AETC

When Kondwani Kamiyala recently spent seven days at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre as a guardian, the experience changed his perspective on life forever. During the stay, he saw, smelled and touched death every day. Now back home and sobered up by the experience, he recounts the life-changing moments.

 

It is some time after six in the evening at the Adult Emergency Trauma Centre (AETC) at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH) in Blantyre. A woman, in her late 40s or early 50s, asks if she is on the correct queue for admission into this referral hospital.

Her husband, on a wheelchair, looks very sickly. He is talking to himself, as the wife tells the attendant on duty his personal details. She hands the attendant her husband’s blue health passport, on which the attendant sticks a barcode from her computer. That is his registration into the hospital and is referred to Ward 3B.

As she pushes the wheelchair, a dark blue Toyota Ipsum arrives at the front of AETC. It parks near a red tag marked: Emergency, Ambulances Only, Keep Clear.  Three women put another woman on a stretcher, which they push into AETC.

The woman is carted behind one of the curtains in AETC where some patients spend a few hours before they are allocated wards. Several minutes pass. Then, the three women start wailing. The woman has passed away.

Apparently, she had fainted while at some prayers in Chirimba before she was rushed to the hospital.

The following morning: Ward 3B, the place I was to spend a week as a guardian for a patient.

The ward is congested. It is visiting time, and men and women from all walks of life surround patients on the 62 beds of this ward. The visitors have brought tea in flasks, breakfast in food warmers and containers. Although it is early morning, the ward is stuffing hot.

My patient is allocated a bed, nay a mattress, somewhere in the corridor to Ward 3B. As a guardian, I don’t have an inkling where I will lay my head on in this ward.

Lost in thought, my eyes catch sight of the woman who pushed her husband from the AETC last night. Her husband looks so weak. His eyes are not blinking. He has stopped talking to himself. His lips are just shaking. She is pushing his wheelchair back into the ‘serious’ side-ward.

A woman, dressed in black, is preaching in Ward 3B that God heals. She says Jesus Christ conquered death, and the patients should not doubt God’s healing mercies. A touching message, resonating in the heart.

The woman who had been pushing her husband into the ‘serious’ side-ward hastily walks out, towards the nurses’ office, just close to the Ward 3B entrance. As she walks back to the ‘serious’ side ward, three nurses follow her. Soon, the woman walks out of the ‘serious’  side-ward. She is wailing. Her husband has passed away.

“All guardians, go into the corridor. Visitors, time for seeing patients is up!” a female guard announces, and the visitors start flocking out.

I join other guardians lining in the corridor, without really knowing what is going on. As guardians, I later learn, we are supposed to escort the departed to the mortuary. Four nurses drag a stretcher with the body, draped in a white cloth marked with a red cross. That was the first in a series of escorts to the mortuary that I will be on for the week or so as a guardian in this ward.

Back from the mortuary, I try to make my entry into Ward 3B. A nurse says it is time for nurses and doctors to see the patients. No guardians are allowed in the ward.

Escorting the departed is not uncommon for guardians in Ward 3B. A patient on the next bed would spend a whole hour groaning. You meet his lifeless eyes and sympathise with his guardians (his wife and mother) wailing even before he departs. They wonder who will bring a meal on the table back home in Thyolo.

Next, it would be another patient two beds away: an old man whose guardian (his grandson) would spend most of his time trying to stop him from removing a drip he felt was inflicting pain on his aged body.

Experiences with death would be with you at least three or four times a day. The world outside continues as business as usual.

The time in Ward 3B remains unforgettable with one patient. Let us call him Paul. Words continue flowing from his mouth. Sensible at times. Incomprehensible at some points. He knows no time. Deep in the night, at dawn.

When visitors flock into Ward 3B, some think he has some authority in the ward. Some patients and guardians in Ward 3B feel he should have been sent to the Mental Hospital in Zomba.

Not without cause. One day, the taps run dry. By the way, Ward 3B is a male ward, but it is dominated by women who are nursing their husbands, brothers, children and fathers. Both men and women (a little over 100) share three bathrooms and three toilets.

When the taps run dry, Paul relieves himself in a plastic bag, which he disposes somewhere near the ablution block. That incurs the wrath of patients and guardians alike.

“We are here looking after the sick. Such careless behaviour can lead to infections,” decries one guardian, appointed chairperson of the ward.

Sleeping in Ward 3B is another affair. Patients are on one of the 62 beds, others sleep on mattresses strewn on the floor. For guardians, the floor is where you lay your head on. If you have beddings from home, well and good. But some just spread a chitenje cloth.

For all that, one can’t stop appreciating the efforts of nurses and doctors working tirelessly to save lives; Attendants pushing carts of nsima at lunch; doctors taking blood samples; nurses giving out medication at dusk.

The patients are treated for different ailments: a man suffering from epilepsy who bit off half of his tongue, a young man whose neck is stiff and legs swollen from carrying on his head at least 30 50kg bags of pigeon peas at his agro-processing workplace.

Yet, not all is gloomy in Ward 3B. You get to read newspapers from visitors and learn new words such as cashgate. You get to see on the TV Cabinet ministers apologising for saying striking doctors belong to certain political parties.

You can’t stop imagining how much of the billions stashed in Capital Hill car boots could have helped ease congestion in wards such as Ward 3B, buy medication, build a water reservoir and construct more toilets and bathroom so that men and women do not share the same as they do in Ward 3B.

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One Comment

  1. Thanks for your sober report, I am sorry to see people suffer this much. Time for change is coming, do not dispair.

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