Failed by surgery waiting list 

Failed by surgery waiting list 

Doreen Ramaselele is a no-nonsense kind of activist who doesn’t easily take no for an answer. Even when her own cancer diagnosis threatened to strike her down, she soldiered on with her work. There’s no stopping her now, she says, because: “things are bad”.

There’s no stopping activist Doreen Ramaselele. Even a personal battle with cancer has not dimmed her resolve to keep fighting for quality healthcare for all citizens. (Image: Ufrieda Ho)
There’s no stopping activist Doreen Ramaselele. Even a personal battle with cancer has not dimmed her resolve to keep fighting for quality healthcare for all citizens. (Image: Ufrieda Ho)

Ramaselele’s own critical illness gave her a first-hand understanding into how inefficient bureaucracy, inferior treatment and poor service allows people to fall through the cracks, especially when they are at their weakest physically.

Ramaselele, who lives in the Modajikloof area in Limpopo, was diagnosed with cervical cancer in April last year. She was told she needed to be operated on as soon as possible.

“I went for a pap smear and they told me I was stage one. Every week I went to Kgapane Hospital, but every week they told me to come back next week,” says Ramaselele, who is the TAC branch organiser for the Kgapane and Tzaneen areas.

Her condition deteriorated, and the pain started taking its toll. Her colleagues at the TAC offices in Tzaneen witnessed her rapid weight- and hair-loss, and remember that on some days, she was doubled over in pain as she walked. Still Ramaselele continued to work, supporting people living with HIV, keeping tabs on clinics, and making her voice heard. The TAC office had to force her to take sick leave.

TAC trainer Moses Mushe Makhomisani says: “One of the most painful things was that here was an activist who had fought for the rights of others, often being expelled from clinics and meetings because she refused to take nonsense; and now she was too weak to fight for herself.”

By December, her condition had taken a turn for the worse.

“I was washing, and I saw things coming out of me. I had to call my sister to come look,” she says.

Ramaselele made calls to a friend in Johannesburg, who got her an appointment at Charlotte Maxeke Hospital in Johannesburg. Her sister drove her to hospital, 430km away.

“I didn’t even wait. I had the surgery that same day, because it was very serious,” says the widowed mother of three boys.

Ramaselele may be happy to have finally got the medical help that saved her life, but in the five months since her surgery, she’s heard of four other cases of women in Kgapane Hospital who died because they were turned away for surgery.

“I would have died. But they do nothing about this, even though we are losing mothers, those who are taking care of families,” she says.

With her strength returning, Ramaselele is not about to rest. Out of ten, she rates health care in her community at one. Issues range from filthy toilets at clinics, to lack of privacy during consultations, to nursing sisters who treat patients rudely and impatiently. Stock outs of ordinary medicine like headache pills and cough medicines, and long queues of up to five or six hours, are common; and there are regularly no doctors to be seen, and no information provided when mobile clinics do not arrive as planned.

She points out that ARV stock outs in the area have reduced since a TAC sit-in was staged at the local clinics back in 2013.

“I will keep on fighting, because we have something called the Constitution; and Section 27 of the Constitution says we have a right to food, water, health care and social assistance,” she says.