Says Madiba has lost his sparkle
Graca Machel, wife of former South
African President Nelson Mandela has said that she is losing hope as the icon
battles lung infection. Speaking to a local television station, Machel said it was
painful to see her husband “ageing”. “I mean, this spirit and this sparkle, you
see that somehow it’s fading,” she told ENews Central Africa. “To see him
ageing, it’s something also which pains you …
You understand and you know it has
to happen.” Mandela’s grand-daughter Ndileka told the same TV network that he
had come to accept his condition. “I think he takes it in his stride, he has
come to accept that it’s part of growing old, and it’s part of humanity as
such,” she said. “At some point you will depend on someone else, he has come to
embrace it.”
Military doctors are treating
Mandela for a recurring lung infection, an ailment the 94-year-old
anti-apartheid leader remains susceptible to because of his age and his 27
years in prison. Government officials acknowledged for the first time yesterday
that the illness forced soldiers to admit Mandela to a military hospital at the
weekend, though they said the politician was responding to treatment. Mandela
fought off a similar infection in 2011 and once contracted tuberculosis while
imprisoned.
Medical experts said respiratory
illnesses like pneumonia striking a man his age are a serious matter that
require care and monitoring. “They call pneumonia ‘the old man’s friend’
because it is the thing that ultimately carries many people off,” said Dr.
Peter Openshaw, the director of the Center for Respiratory Infection at
Imperial College’s National Heart and Lung Institute in London. “What I guess
they’ll be doing is trying to find out exactly which type of infection it is
and then to give it the most appropriate treatment.
With modern antibiotics and
investigation, then there’s no reason a chest infection by itself should be
untreatable.” The announcement ended speculation about what was troubling the
ailing Mandela. His ongoing hospitalization has caused growing concern in South
Africa, a nation of 50 million people that largely reveres Mandela for being
the nation’s first democratically elected president who sought to bring the
country together after centuries of racial division.
The tests Mandela underwent at 1
Military Hospital near South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, detected the lung
infection, presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj said in a statement. “Madiba is
receiving appropriate treatment and he is responding to the treatment,” Maharaj
said, referring to Mandela by his clan name as many do in South Africa in a
sign of affection. In January 2011, Mandela was admitted to a Johannesburg
hospital for what officials initially described as tests but what turned out to
be an acute respiratory infection.
The chaos that followed Mandela’s
stay at that public hospital, with journalists and the curious surrounding it
and entering wards, saw the South African military take charge of his care and
the government control the information about his health. In recent days many in
the press and public have complained about the lack of concrete details that
the government has released about Mandela’s condition.
Mandela has a history with lung
problems. He fell ill with tuberculosis in 1988 toward the tail-end of his
prison years, after he had been moved from the notorious Robben Island and to
another jail to ease the apartheid government’s efforts to negotiate with him
about a possible release. At first, doctors were uncertain why Mandela had a
persistent cough that ultimately caused him to collapse during a meeting with
his lawyer. After being taken to a Cape Town hospital, a doctor told him he had
water in his lungs. Mandela initially refused to believe the doctor, he wrote
in his autobiography “Long Walk to Freedom.”
“With a hint of annoyance, (the
doctor) said, ‘Mandela, take a look at your chest,’” Mandela recounted. “He
pointed out that one side of my chest was actually larger than the other.”
Surgeons immediately cut into Mandela’s chest and removed two liters (half a
gallon) of liquid from his lungs, which tested positive for tuberculosis.
Doctors at the time suggested Mandela contracted the disease from his damp
prison cell. About 1.4 million people worldwide die each year from tuberculosis,
a bacterial infection which can stay dormant for years.
It also can cause permanent lung
damage, though in his autobiography Mandela says doctors caught it in time.
However, tuberculosis can return to trouble those previously infected, properly
treated or not, and previous damage could have been missed, Openshaw said.
Openshaw, who has not seen Mandela’s medical records and spoke generally about
treating patients, said pneumonia is the most likely respiratory illness to
affect an elderly person, though others can strike as well.
Doctors typically use antibiotics to
treat such infections, though there needed to be care made in deciding how much
of a dose to give an older patient. And there’s the challenge of treating a
patient that a nation and many around the world remain anxiously worried about.
“It’s particularly difficult if it’s in a special patient, where you really
have to be very careful to try not to overreact, but just to treat them as if
they were any other patient,” Openshaw said. But the doctor later acknowledged
the obvious: “It’s very hard to the balance right (for) a special, special
patient.”
Mandela was a leader in the struggle
against racist white rule in South Africa and once he emerged from 27 years in
prison in 1990, he won worldwide acclaim for urging reconciliation. He won
South Africa’s first truly democratic elections in 1994, serving one five-year
term.
The Nobel laureate later retired
from public life to live in his remote village of Qunu, in the Eastern Cape,
and last made a public appearance when his country hosted the 2010 World Cup
soccer tournament. Mandela disengaged himself from the country’s politics over
the last decade but continued campaigning against AIDS. He has grown increasing
frail in recent years.
Sun
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