Home Visits

The organization that I work with has home-based carers that do home visits to sick patients.  This week, I went on three home visits to patients that were unable to leave their homes due to illness.  Each visit evoked different emotions ranging from hope to despair.  Around 40% of the people in my area are infected with HIV.  This means that almost half of the people I meet on the streets are infected with a serious disease.  The thing is, though, you would never know.  Whether it’s because of stigma or perseverance, people hide their disease and just keep on keeping on.  In fact, sometimes I forget what a huge problem the HIV epidemic is in South Africa because I don’t run across it every day.  The patients that I saw on my home visits, however, were the people who have been hit hard.

The first visit was a 23 year old woman.  A couple of months ago, she was unable to walk or use her arms/hands.  She had horrible neuropathy. Neuropathy is a side effect of one of the ARVs (HIV treatment) and is especially prevalent if the patient is also on TB medication. (TB is also a huge problem).  When we visited, she had a big smile on her face as she slowly walked up using a walker.  She said she is slowly regaining strength even though she can’t fully open and close her hands yet.  She had a strong will to overcome this sickness and she provided such hope for all of the people in similar conditions.

In contrast, my third visit was to a 40 year old woman.  Walking up to her hut, we could hear her moaning and crying; it didn’t stop the whole visit.  Her house reeked of old urine.  She had a stroke around 10 years ago and was never able to fully recover health.  Her legs are contracted into a kneeling position and can’t be straightened and she has no use of her arms.  When she was in the hospital, she couldn’t feed herself and the nurses didn’t feed her, so she went without food.  The sister that was caring for her passed away so now she is staying with her children who neglect her.  She complained that they don’t feed or bathe her.  She has defaulted from her HIV treatment because nobody was there to give them to her.

South Africa is filled with a range of emotions regarding HIV/AIDS.  Some fight on, some give up, some refuse to admit there is a problem.  I only hope that in my time here I can make a small dent in trying to improve the problem.