Healthcare workers are at a greater risk of contracting diseases than the average person, especially doctors working in rural areas. Honours student in Health Journalism at Rhodes University David Dludla tells the story of a doctor who has overcome disease, misdiagnosis and other odds while working in the Eastern Cape.
Healthcare workers are at a greater risk of contracting diseases than the average person, especially doctors working in rural areas. Honours student in Health Journalism at Rhodes University David Dludla tells the story of a doctor who has overcome disease, misdiagnosis and other odds while working in the Eastern Cape.
The calm and confidence of young Dr Bart Willems are precious assets in the facility where he works. He roams the hospital corridors, checking on his patients in the wards and to them he is a saviour. But besides the medical expertise he possesses, the white-coated doctor with a stethoscope hanging from his neck brings hope for recovery with his mere presence.
Although falling victim to a disease that he is supposed to cure, this doctor-turned-patient has survived something that kills many South Africans. In 2007 Willems was diagnosed with extra-pulmonary pleural tuberculosis while working as a medical intern at Cecilia Makiwane Hospital and a community service doctor in Frere Hospital, both in the Eastern Cape.
When he started feeling a pain in his chest and fell ill, he consulted a friend, a doctor he worked with. “At first he couldn’t find anything wrong with me but in any case, he took some X-rays,” Willems said. “There was something very small on the lower side of my one lung. It is called an effusion, a sign that something is not right.”
He said they learn in medical school that normally an effusion, or escape of fluid from vessels, is probably pneumonia, an inflammatory condition of the lung. “So I took a dose of quite strong antibiotics,” he said. When he later learnt that the TB bacterium was lodged between his left lung and chest wall, making it very difficult to locate, he had to commit to taking a daily cocktail of four to six different tablets for six months.
“I never knew for sure if I was going to be completely cured,” Willems said and confessed that it had really made him stress. Taking no chances, he took the medication for the required half a year, even though he felt well after just a month.
“Many patients do not know why they have to take their pills for six months. What people need to accept is that TB bacteria takes longer to die, and a lack of understanding of this makes them stop taking the regimens only after a few months because they feel better,” he explained.
During the time he was on medication, Willems recalls being on a “quite painful” chest drain for three days, “a small pipe that goes into the lung and it sucked 2.5 litres of fluid which had swollen in my lung,” he said. But the doctor’s fears were not so much of death or permanent illness, but concern that his swimming and surfing lifestyle appeared to be in jeopardy.
He feared that TB would compromise his daily habits that demand a full lung capacity. So as part of the recovery process, Willems took up swimming and pool free-diving to restore his lung capacity. In a recent competition he achieved a South African no-fins record by swimming 114 metres under water in one breath – just another push in the ‘TB can be cured’ direction.
This energetic young doctor is also a member of a group called Surfing Doctors for medical practitioners who are passionate about the sea and surfing. He has travelled the world but has chosen to remain grounded in South Africa.
The World Health Organisation's (WHO) 2011 report estimates that almost half a million people contract TB every year in this country. Therefore in any population of 100 000 people, a little more than the Johannesburg Soccer City Stadium’s capacity, 981 of them have TB and 50 do not survive it – mainly because of not adhering to their drug regime. Healthcare workers are one of the groups most susceptible to contracting TB.
Their risk is three times the national average in some provinces, regardless of the ward they work in. But Willems’s experience in Eastern Cape public healthcare as a doctor and patient come in handy for his new occupation as the Public Health Medicine’s Registrar at Stellenbosch Universit.
But the fact that he has worked in this province and is now in the Western Cape, where he puts in long hours at a healthcare facility, puts him at greater risk of contracting TB again.
And naturally he is worried about re-infection. “Of course I’m scared. Healthcare workers are twice as likely to get TB. I am scared that I might contract it again,” he said. Yet he goes to work every day and continues to help others, as if he was at no risk at all.
