This & that with Mal'phosa: Not necessarily doom and gloom

Hospitals are not just palaces of doom and gloom. It is not just arrivals and departures.. There is life besides just giving patients tender loving care. One of the main tasks of nurses is to write reports about their patients. This helps to track the progress, or otherwise, of patients as they fight for their lives. This also helps nurses and doctors to plan new interventions if patients aren't improving, or to continue with the same course if its working. Further, reports help the next shift to know how the patient responds to treatment, what was or should be done, and any other vital aspects to look out for.

One wouldn't want to be caught by surprise, like this patient who suddenly said, "Nurse, I can't breathe." The nurse retortes wryly. "So you want to breathe for you?"

One humorous report written by a first year had the whole ward in chuckles for weeks. "She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband reports that she was very hot in bed last night."

The same girl on another patients report wrote, "Bleeding began in the chest and continued all the way to Luveve."

A senior sister, who obviously had depended mostly on juniors and students to write reports wrote, "Social history reveals this 1year old patient is not married, does not smoke or drink, and is presently unemployed." All these are, realistically and naturally, not applicable to a 1year old. And the same patient "---had porrige for breakfast and anorexia for lunch," according to the report.

A patient was being admitted to the ward for tests and probable treatment. The Sister from Casualty reported; "On the second day the head was swollen, and on the third day, it disappeared." And, "Patient was present when the cannula was inserted." Well, we might be very advanced but we still need patients to be present when we treat them.

And their skin must be present too.The Sister who examined a man suffering from anaemia wrote, "Skin: pale but present."

What about this one that almost got a doctor arrested? "Vaginal packing out, Dr. Malphosa in"?

At times common sense leaves us high and dry. Who would think there are some more parts beyond the toes except this one guy who wrote, "The patient was numb from her toes down." He continued, "Her foot was amputated above knee."

One other student, after taking history from a patient reported, "Patient has two teenage children but no other abnormalties."

When I moved to another Health Care Centre, the first objective in the Misson Statement caught my eye. I thought it was grissly absurd. It demonstrated lack of verbal skill. It read, "We aim to kill as few patients as possible." But then the aim of any health institution is to save lives. They told me the In- charge was an unscrupulous ninnyhamer who loved to tread on the bawdy and at times dangerous territories. I believed when on Xmas day, he gleefully decorated the Christimas tree with an assortment of condoms that had grotesque drawings of sperms all over them. He, I concluded, needed the whole night to do all that codswallop.

At midday, one patient spoiled his day. His wife was pregnant. Apparently, the In-charge would pull a condom over his thumb to demostrate how it should be used. This man had done so as well, when he slept with his wife - pull the condom over his finger. He thought by so doing, he was using the condom as a contraceptive. "You are useless. I don't know how you passed Grade Seven."

They further told me he was once in trouble for offering moaners a bonus of a dead three month old when they came to claim the body of their dead relative. He offered this dead baby as a bonus, he said.
Talking about bonus, you are lucky if you got any. Wasenza Corona virus.

Ngiyabonga mina.