Having gone into full-time Christian ministry in 1994, we had no medical aid, and so were dependent upon the country’s steadily deteriorating healthcare system. Mercifully, we were in the Western Cape, which had managed—against all odds—to maintain a fairly good standard of care. I had worked alongside many fine healthcare professionals in Cape Town for fifteen years in the battle against HIV/AIDS and had great respect for them. However, the system was overloaded and understaffed, so patient meant, not just a person’s status, but also the demeanour required to deal with the system.
In 2013 I posted this, which told some of the story (click on it to open it in another window). Here is a bit more of the story leading up to her admission.
We clung to the hope that Viktor Frankel described as The Delusion of Reprieve; the belief that this diagnosis or treatment would solve the problem. Like a gambling addict who believes that this hand will be the one that wins—that will pay off all his debts and make him a millionaire—Linny and I, as life addicts, kept believing each time that this treatment was going to cure her.
Meanwhile, at home, things were going from bad to worse. Linny worked part-time, so she scheduled her work periods around her head-aches, but, as they were becoming more and more unrelenting, she was spending an increasing amount of time in bed. I was working full-time and—increasingly—running the household as Linny got worse. More and more sleep-deprived, I was becoming less and less patient, and I was starting to fall asleep whilst having a bath, or in the car while stopped at the traffic lights.
My muddled brain started making itself noticed at the seminary too. During a Church History lecture I told my students that, after the Reformation, the Western Christian world was divided into two opposing camps—Roman Catholics and Prostitutes. I wasn’t even aware of my mistake until one of the students pointed it out.
I can laugh about it now, but it wasn’t very amusing then. The kindly college faculty soon organised for volunteers to teach my classes and I was put on indefinite compassionate leave. I greatly appreciated this, but it didn’t cure Linny.
Of course, Linny and I were Baby Boomers—raised by the Greatest Generation—so we had been taught that one shouldn’t complain or ask for help. They had got through the Great Depression and World War II without help, so we shouldn’t be weaklings. I suspect that it might have been from this generation that we got the destructive cliché: ‘God helps those who help themselves’. So, not many people knew what was happening. We just soldiered on.
Until the day of Linny’s admission…