My last moments with Tata Mandela - doctor

How many boyfriends do you have? That's how Nelson Mandela first greeted Major Motshidisi Sehotsane, the military doctor assigned to treat him.

That was in June 2005, five months after Sehotsane, 41, joined the defence force's health services.

Eight years later she would hear him take his last breath and certify him dead at his Houghton, Johannesburg, home on the night of December 5 last year.

"I had my [last] hour moment with uTata ... I heard his last breath ... I did not cry, I had to play my role as a doctor, comfort the family," Sehotsane said, her voice suddenly cracking.

When Madiba's health took a turn for the worse on December 4, Sehotsane was recalled from a conference she was attending in Cape Town. At his home the next day, she found seven doctors in a meeting with the Mandela family. "I realised something was not good. I did not want to go into the main house."

At around 7.30pm, she was called into Madiba's room to relieve the other doctors. That was to be her last moment with him.

Sehotsane is reluctant to speak about that final hour before Mandela's death and to say who was by his side, except to confirm that he was surrounded by his family.

Sehotsane left the Mandela home the following morning, switched her cellphone off and "went into a deep sleep".

Now head of 1Military Hospital's intensive care unit, she said that although it had been an agonising moment she felt a sense of relief and slept as she had never done before.

Sehotsane's original assignment was to travel with Mandela but she was put on full-time call after a health incident during Madiba's 2009 birthday celebration at his Houghton home.

She received a call from her commander with the order: "From tomorrow, you do not have to come to the hospital; you have to work at Houghton."

She said: "I would sit with him. I even got the unedited version of the Long Walk to Freedom, things that he could not write about ...

"But that version I am taking to my grave."