It's SteeTime!

I am featuring a series of a brave ordeal a friend of mine, Sarah Na'matovu, whom I went to medical school with, went through a few years ago. Her writing touched my heart. This story is about her heart. Heart surgery to be exact.  April 1 2011 After eight hours of surgery, I wake up and am like, "Oh, I am alive, I made it through!" So I'm almost smiling but I have this thing in my throat and am asking the nurse to take it out, she says, "Don't talk." I motion for her to give me pen and paper to write. I don't know what I write because I am drowsy but the next thing I know the airway tube is out as well as the NG-tube. I have tubes going in all orifices of my body!  Meanwhile I am thinking to myself that surgery is not so bad or that scary after all. 30 minutes later the anesthesia is wearing off fast. Suddenly I can feel every incision. Every nip and tuck. Every suture they had made on my heart and sternum. I start moaning in pain.

Let's call her Jane Hove. She came in on Thursday night. I had been on call for 13 hours when I first starting clerking her into admission to our wards. I was still in the pleasant stage mood. A thirty six year old peasant woman from a village in Mashonaland West. She had been diagnosed with HIV a couple of years ago, each year ridden with different opportunistic infections, the current one being TB which had affected not only her lungs but also a form of meningitis we term TB Meningitis. These were straight forward to treat on antiTB's and steroids, but unfortunately for Jane, because of chronic illness and side effects of some of her ARV's, Jane also had Severe Anemia and was going into heart failure because of this. On average a unit of blood in a state hospital in Zimbabwe costs $100. Jane needed 3 pints to get her haemoglobin up to the bare minimum. Not only was there a shortage of blood, she also couldn't afford one pint. We lost Jane on Sunday afternoon.