Pretoria - The search for David Robert at Steve Biko Hospital last October took his family from bed to bed and when they did not find him, they hoped he had been moved to another ward.
The mystery of his whereabouts deepened when nurses paged through several registers looking for him, his daughter Dawn Potgieter told the Pretoria News on Monday.
“After a while they pulled us into a side room and told us they had lost him,” she said.
Her father was 73 years of age and had a fractured pelvis and also suffered from cancer. “We asked them what they meant. because he could not possibly have wandered out due to his condition, and then they said he had died,” she said.
More shocking than the death was the fact that Roberts had been dead for more than 17 hours when they were informed.
Dawn and her mother and brother had arrived at the hospital for the afternoon visit when they learnt that he had died shortly before 10pm the previous night.
“According to the ward record book, they had called my mother at 10.30pm to tell her, and when they could not get hold of her on that one attempt, they put him in the mortuary and forgot all about us,” Potgieter said.
As they struggled to absorb the news, the troubles of her father’s stay in the hospital flooded back and they realised that he had not been treated fairly by hospital staff.
Roberts had been diagnosed with cancer a month earlier, and had spent three weeks in the hospital with a broken pelvis. His bones were brittle, they were told.
Surgery was planned, but in the three weeks he spent there he was not taken to theatre, nor was he given any of the cancer medication provided by the family when he was brought to the hospital.
“In fact, for two of the three weeks he was confined to the bed and was often tied down because he tried to go to the bathroom rather than relieve himself on the bed.”
He was not given a bed pan, nor did he have disposable nappies. Despite that he was not allowed to go to the bathroom.
When he was discharged, the container of chemo drugs had not been touched: “We had asked them to administer them to avoid him losing track of time and so that he could take them as prescribed,” Potgieter said.
Her father was taken home and although he suffered badly and was in extreme pain, he begged not to be taken back to the hospital.
His son was always there to carry him to the bathroom when necessary. He was always bathed and the bed sores he developed in hospital were treated.
“Unfortunately, he got so sick that we had to take him back, and throughout the trip there he cried bitterly because he did not want to go back to that ‘prison’,” Potgieter said.
That was on October 24. The visit of the evening of the 26th took a different turn: “He had no pain and he seemed perfectly calm and at peace.”
It was the day after that they went back to see him, only to find that he had been dead for almost a day, she said.
The family has tried since then to get answers about their treatment, but no answers have not been forthcoming.
Health Department spokesman Steve Mabona could not provide answers.