Dr Suhayl Essa had just finished his shift at Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital at 7pm on Friday and was heading home when his head of department called him on his cellphone and urged him to return to the hospital to evacuate patients.
He had known about the fire when he started work that afternoon, but the fire department seemed to have everything under control.
Apart from the cars lining the street after the staff had been told to move them out the parking garage, it seemed to Essa the drama was over.
“People thought it was just a little fire,” he said. “There was lots of talk but no real panic.”
After getting the call, he raced back to the hospital and found what he described as “a frantic situation”.
Doctors and nurses were moving patients out of all the hospital’s five blocks and sending them to hospitals throughout Gauteng.
“We were transferring patients to any hospital that could take them.”
Meanwhile Essa, who works as an emergency room doctor, had helped move patients out of the smoke-strewn blocks to the antenatal unit, which was as far from the fire as it was possible to get.
“Then we heard that there was a lot of smoke rising up into the antenatal area,” he said.
Donning an N95 mask with another surgical mask on top, he went to check on the situation. The smoke was so thick that even two masks could not keep it out of his lungs.
“I was coughing, my eyes were burning,” he said. “There was smoke everywhere.”
I was coughing, my eyes were burning, there was smoke everywhere.
— Dr Suhayl Essa
As the night wore on, Essa kept evacuating patients. By 11.30pm, he and his colleagues had moved between 200 and 300 patients.
“There were patients lining the corridors,” he said. “We were effectively triaging patients, selecting those we needed to be transferred urgently.
“The critical problem was what to do with the patients in the hospital’s ICU. The ICU is a few floors above where the fire started in the basement, but there was no plan on where to send the patients as Gauteng’s ICUs are already under severe pressure.”
Just before midnight, Essa was told to go home and rest because he needed to be fresh for what the next day would bring.
On Saturday morning, the final patients were evacuated from blocks four and five.
“There were a lot of ambulances coming and going all day,” he said.
Meanwhile, there were still medical emergencies to attend to. In the midst of the evacuation, Essa had to deal with a critically ill patient who was in renal failure and needed urgent dialysis.
The man was given a slim chance of survival because there were no dialysis machines available.
During the day he went into cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated, and Essa had to tell the man’s family to expect the worst.
“But he was still fighting and there was a glimmer of hope.”
This is not a good time to be a patient in Gauteng.
— Dr Suhayl Essa
That evening, an ICU bed was found for him at a hospital in the far East Rand, where he at last could be put onto a dialysis machine.
By the end of the day, the 2,000-bed Charlotte Maxeke hospital was empty.
Doctors and nurses were also transferred to other hospitals, sometimes with patients they had been looking after.
After restructuring their shifts, Essa was transferred to Helen Joseph Hospital.
He said he was praying he and his colleagues might be able to return to Charlotte Maxeke within a week.
However, engineers will first have to assess the building’s structural integrity before it can be declared safe, and the smoke will also have to be cleared.
The shutdown will put intense pressure on Gauteng’s hospitals, which are already struggling to cope with the coronavirus pandemic.
“Hospitals are taking massive strain,” said Essa. “It’s quite catastrophic for the entire Gauteng health department. There are not enough ICU beds and not enough space to put ventilated patients.”
He said anyone who could afford to stay at home should do so, not only to protect themselves from Covid-19.
“This is not a good time to be a patient in Gauteng,” he said.
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