Winning smile: Dr Mosadi Mahoko at the Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town. Last year she won the Jack Penn award, which had not been awarded for 25 years. (David Harrison/M&G)
A distinguished plastic surgeon and one of the first black people to reach her level, Dr Mosadi Mohako speaks to Athandiwe Saba about the less glamorous aspects of the job, her interests in cosmetic cleft lip and rhinoplasty and enjoying downtime pre and post Covid-19
You’ve just come back from work. What does an average day entail?
I’m a plastic surgeon who works in the government sector at Tygerberg Hospital. So my everyday work — it’s, you know, not the [idea of a] glamorous plastic surgeon life that people, I think, have of plastic surgeons.
I am up at six every morning to be at work by 7am. Most of the days are spent in theatre, pretty much from 8am till four. So, believe it or not, today is an early day for me. It can sometimes go on to 9pm at night.
So it’s not the fancy stuff that we watch on television. What is some of the real work that you get to do?
It’s not the Doctor 90210 plastic surgery for sure. In the government sector, you can imagine that we need to make sure our resources are equally spread to all our patients.
We do quite a lot of reconstruction work. A lot of it is either trauma work — so people who have been in car accidents, have gunshot wounds, stab wounds, they’ve got some skin missing, their faces are broken, the jaws are broken, and they need reconstruction. And then the other side of it is cancer reconstruction. And that’s any[one] from people who have small skin cancers on their faces or their bodies, to even big skin cancers. So we try to restore people’s appearance to as normal as we can. But also to get them to normal functioning, you know, so that they can get back into society and people don’t end up being ostracised.
But also, on a smaller scale, we offer some minor cosmetic procedures, like breast reductions. And to people who have had massive weight loss and have excess skin. None of it is in the name of vanity.
Why plastic surgery? It’s pretty rare. What drove you into this field?
I got into plastic surgery in a very roundabout way. I actually wanted to study orthopaedic surgery, which is the study of bones and their diseases. I found it fascinating.
It was quite a male-dominated field when I was coming up and I thought, “Shoo, why is it that women aren’t in this field?” But as you can imagine, if you’ve ever seen an orthopaedic surgeon, they’re quite tall, strong guys because they are moving bones and joints, and it’s quite heavy work. However, at the time, it didn’t work out, for whatever the reasons.
But after liaising with a friend of mine who was in plastic surgery — as you noted there weren’t a lot of us — I realised that a lot of this reconstructive work is in a way similar to what you would think of [in] restoring somebody with a broken leg.
It’s the same as being able to restore function to somebody’s life and enable them to have a good quality of life. So I thought, “Okay, let’s go into plastic surgery and see how it goes.” And I ended up loving it.
Professor Sophie Mahoko, the late former dean of the school of health sciences at the University of Venda, is your mother. What was it like to have such an accomplished woman to look up to?
I’ve always felt like a bit of an underachiever compared to my mom. My mom and her friends would even say to me: “Look, you have one degree, and you call yourself a doctor. You did one undergraduate degree; your mother had five degrees.” But having that kind of a person as your mom, you learn the value of hard work. You know that things don’t come easy.
I mean, when my mom did her PhD, there were times when she would be away doing fieldwork for weeks at a time. It’s not something that was given to her on a silver platter. So whatever I want out of life, whatever accolades I wanted to get, I had to work for it. Nobody was going to give it to me.
My mother started off as a nurse. She was a midwife for much of her life. You know, the circumstances that our parents grew up in. However, where you start does not define where you end up in life.
Living in Cape Town — a beautiful place — what do you do besides working?
That’s a bit of a difficult question to ask now during Covid times. If you asked me about 16 months ago, I might have had a different answer.
Okay, okay, pre-Covid and post-Covid answers.
Okay, so one of the things that made me love Cape Town is the seaside life. Being a girl from a landlocked, dry, flat area to moving to a city where there’s a mountain and the sea — it was amazing. I loved spending time by the sea. It is one of the best things about living in Cape Town. And the food is amazing. I think it’s one of the, if not the, best places in the country to get good food.
I’m not very sporty. When I do any exercise, it’s usually at home, like a bit of yoga. But when I was younger I was into everything. I did dancing and gymnastics. But unfortunately, in my old age … [laughs].
Speaking about growing up in a landlocked area, take us back to growing up. How was Mosadi as a young girl?
Mosadi was a curious child. I was one of those 20 questions or 100 questions type of children. As the youngest of four kids, I think I was also pretty independent, because my siblings are quite a bit older than me.
I did all my schooling in Mafikeng. And I was quite busy doing everything from sports, science, eisteddfods, cultural things. I was a really busy child.
Tell us a bit about the honour of winning the Jack Penn award last year, after 25 years without a winner.
So it’s not just in plastic surgery that you have this type of medal. You have it in all different kinds of specialities. Jack Penn was one of the first plastic surgeons in South Africa. [The award is] sponsored by the Penn family.
I think it was in 1995 when it was last awarded and for the past 25 years they seemed to believe that nobody was worthy of it until me.
I was shocked. Because the plastic surgery exam is a difficult exam. In the past, it has had the highest failure rate. It wasn’t uncommon for people to write two or three times. And so to not only pass the exam the first time but to be given this award — I was absolutely dumbstruck.
It doesn’t simply justify your knowledge. But for me it showed me that I deserve to be here and I chose to do the right thing.
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