Admitted to a clinic with a broken nose, Minas Michael left `a vegetable’. His parents, however, refused to give up hope. Angella Johnson reports
A neglected basketball net hangs forlornly over the garage door of Minas Michael’s home. It was here that the teenager practised the shots which made him a Transvaal provincial player. Today he glides by the hoop apparently oblivious of its presence, staring straight ahead as his wheelchair is pushed by a nurse.
Michael (19) is what one doctor described as “a vegetable” – the result of brain damage during a minor operation three years ago at Linksfield Clinic in Johannesburg to repair a nose injury sustained in a rugby match.
He left the clinic unable to move, speak or hear after his heart stopped for 17 minutes and a defibrillator allegedly failed to work. Doctors recommended his parents put him in a home for the mentally disabled and forget about him.
They ignored the advice. But it has cost the family dearly – both financially and emotionally – as they struggle against the odds to infuse life back into their only son. They are suing the hospital and the doctor for negligence.
“I’m sorry about the mess, but this house is like a hospital,” says Thelma Michael. Her vast living room is littered with equipment needed to nurse her son. A tiny, slim and strikingly attractive brunette, she looks tired – a result of the 24-hour care she lavishes on her son.
“It’s like looking after a six-foot baby,” she says wearily. “He can do nothing for himself and needs a lot of medical care.”
She leaves to help get her son ready for our meeting. His gut-wrenching cries, like a wounded animal, waft into the living room as he battles with the indignity of nappy changes and his inability to communicate.
This is followed by a coughing fit, then hard patting on his back and chest as his father urges him to “cough it up”. There are more guttural cries of “aargh … aargh … aargh” from Minas, then his mother’s gentle voice asking “You want to talk? What is it my boy?”
Five minutes later a handsome, thin figure is wheeled out of the ground floor dining room-turned-bedroom. The only indication of the strapping athlete Minas Michael once was are the takkies he wears on his large feet. His hands and slender long fingers curl inwards like claws as he sits immobile – trapped in his steel chair.
But here is no vegetable. His saucer-like sea-blue eyes, with their long dark lashes, are alive with questions. He stares unblinking, mouth moving soundlessly. Michael has come a long way from the 30kg skeleton who left hospital, but is still far from the 85kg he weighed when he went in. “He’s still growing,” says his mother proudly.
Three years of lifting and moving has left her with a bad back. “For a year I had to cope on my own when my husband was at work. At times I cried and I cracked, but what could I do but pull myself together and carry on.”
Religion has been her strength. It held her together on that fateful day, December 7 1994, when she saw her son wheeled from the clinic’s operating room into intensive care. “He looked like a dead body and I started shouting that’s my kid,” she recalls.
The doctors had assured her it would take only one hour to put right the broken nose that was causing Michael’s breathing problems. “I was in the waiting room three hours and they kept telling me everything would be all right.”
Finally the surgeon told her there had been a complication; that her son had suffered a cardiac arrest and could not breathe unaided.
“I don’t remember much of that conversation,” she says sadly. “I felt lost and fell to my knees in prayer. The doctor said nothing had gone wrong, yet Minas Michael was laying there, white as a sheet, with tubes coming out of his body.”
Thelma and Leonidas Michael were told their son would live for only 24 hours. For this Germiston couple who hail from Cyprus, it was like living out a Greek tragedy. Two days later they learned that their son had sustained extensive brain damage.
“The doctor said he was not our child any more and we should put him in the Avril Elizabeth nursing home,” says Thelma Michael.
A month later Minas Michael was moved to the Barney Hurwitz rehabilitation hospital. It was discovered that his nose drip was leaking into his lungs and an operation was needed to replace it with a stomach tube. He was taken to the Garden City clinic, but infection set in and he almost died.
“No one thought he would make it,” his father recounts. “Even when we took him back to Barney Hurwitz.” He produces a letter from a doctor who diagnosed: “Even with the most skilled and devoted nursing, the life expectancy would be of the order of a year or less with this type of neurological damage.”
Parental love and Minas Michael’s will to live have stumped all medical predictions. He celebrates his 20th birthday in January.
“He used to cry almost 24 hours,” says Leonidas Michael. “Now he smiles at my jokes and his face becomes animated when we talk.”
Leonidas Michael immigrated to South Africa in 1968 and built up a thriving supermarket business in Edenvale, which he had sold just months before the operation.
“We were happy,” he says. “Then this happened. It is the worst thing that can happen to a family. It puts a strain on the marriage because my wife spends all her time caring for Minas and I spend all my time making enough money to pay for expensive medical bills.”
After a 6am to 9pm day (except Sundays when he gets home at 2pm), he helps nurse and stimulate his son.
Thelma Michael remembers that initially her husband would lock himself in a room saying he could not take any more.
“My 16-year-old daughter was also affected; she felt neglected because Minas needed me so much. We don’t even go out any more as a family. It could have driven us apart, but we have pulled through.”
The couple have spent much of their life- savings on medical care – the Linksfield Clinic bill alone is R129 000. Medical aid only covered the first couple of weeks. There are other doctors, equipment, medicine.
“At Barney Hurwitz they wanted R5 000 deposit and R5 000 for the first week’s treatment before they would open the ambulance,” complains Leonidas Michael. “I could carry it because I had just sold my business, but the bills have not stopped coming.”
He claims Barney Hurwitz charged him for 1 350 pairs of nurses’ gloves and doctor’s visits which were not made. When he complained they admitted it was a mistake.
“It is as if the medical industry is geared towards ripping you off when you are at your lowest. Yet, if they could make Minas what he was, I would gladly sell my house and give them every penny I have.”