Women's Day in the Drakensberg
It is finally Friday, August 7th, and I am on call at Greys Hospital for Medicine with Siddhi. My plan is to finish the renal ward work, and all handovers from the day, leave by seven p.m., and drive to the airport to pick up Lana.
She was joining for our cryptically named Cranefly Lifestyle Crew Drakensberg Weekend trip. After much coordination around our various calls and hospital commitments, we had eventually managed to organise a trip to the Drakensberg. which feels like something of a rite of passage when you are doing your internship in Pietermaritzburg.
Long story short: The evening did not go to plan. Through some world class dilly-dallying in the airport lounge, Lana managed to miss her flight. A couple of new admissions from the dialysis unit meant that I was only able to leave short-call at 20hoo and then still had to drive back home to Durban which took about an hour and a half because of traffic and dangerous drivers with Gauteng Province number plates coming down to Durban for the long weekend.
The month long rotation in internal medicine at Greys has been touted as the most relaxing of month of the year by some of those who have recently been through it, but I have had a particularly busy week as the intern on the renal ward. Apart from the very frequent (at least twice weekly) standard bloods on all renal inpatients, and the 4.5 hour long consultant ward rounds, I was most distressed by the complete lack of antibiotic stewardship and the (illogical) approach to investigating and treating the many infectious complications that develop from having different dialysis lines and invasive procedures, but that is a topic for another blog post.
On Saturday morning, Lana managed to get on her flight from Cape Town. I picked her up from the airport and we drove through to PMB.
Siddhi had finished her long call and gone home to sleep. Tyra was now on short call and we couldn't set off for the mountains until her duties were completed. Many hands make light work, so the optimistic plan was to go in and help to finish the ward round procedures to enable her to get out of there a little bit earlier than usual.
Lana graciously became an honorary elective student for the morning and helped see a patient or two. Shamil, ever the the soldier, had come in despite being on leave to try to achieve the same goal. Together we worked through the renal ward, where most of the patients were familiar to me from the week. By the time we finished, it seemed as though everything was under control.
Lana and I went shopping for the last few supplies. We met Faraaz and Charles, who had bought the meat for our braai, and picked up some firewood. Everything appeared to be going remarkably smoothly.
After we returned to Hilton and began packing the car, Tyra sent a message to say that there was a resuscitation underway in the ward. One problem led to another, and any hopes of Tyra leaving early were dashed. There is little point trying to impose a holiday timetable on a hospital.
The delay did give Lana and I enough time to go for a run around Hilton. It was good to stretch our legs before the drive. Eventually, after four in the afternoon, our three cars left separately for the Drakensberg.
Eight junior doctors were finally going away for the weekend. It was also Faraaz’s birthday, giving us another reason to celebrate. After months of planning, we finally made it out of the WhatsApp group.
We reached the Airbnb shortly after nightfall. The house was extremely comfortable, with new furniture, good beds and everything we could reasonably need. It also had a hot tub outside, although our attempts to get it warm were less successful. It wasn't long before we unpacked, got a fire going, and settled down in the braai area, popping open a few drinks to get the weekend started.
In ordinary life, you often meet friends or colleagues briefly or see them at events where everyone circulates between shallow conversations. I think a lot of the magic of sharing a house with a group of friends, comes from the interations around ordinary activities in an evironment of low social optionality: eating together, waiting for the fire to become suitable for braaing, and just sitting around and chattinng long after there is anything important left to say.
I was determined that we should hike the following morning. Not everyone shared my enthusiasm, but we woke earlier than expected and emerged to see Champagne Castle and Cathkin Peak for the first time. They had been hidden by the darkness when we arrived.
We drank tea and coffee outside and made breakfast. I made some pancakes, which I like to think turned out rather well, despite strong doubts from the crowd about my years of experience with a very simple and sugar-free recipe. In my opinion, lemon and honey remain difficult to beat, although we had strawberries and fresh pineapple which also made for good toppings.
With some effort, I persuaded the group that travelling all the way to the Drakensberg without walking in the mountains would be close to sinful. We drove to Monk’s Cowl and took the familiar route towards the Sphinx, stopping briefly at the waterfall about half a kilometre before the Sphinx itself.
I have walked that route more times than I can remember, but it was still worth doing. Some exertion was probably necessary given the quantity of food and drink involved in the weekend. It was extraordinarily hot for the middle of winter, perhaps 28 degrees centigrade, and much warmer than any of us had anticipated.
Charles stayed behind to begin preparing our dinner. When we returned, we ate a lunch of leftovers and toasted Parmesan sourdough, and rested for a couple of hours.
Just before the evening began in earnest, Lana and I went for another run through the estate. The sun was setting over the mountains, and it was one of those quiet, beautiful interludes that becomes more vivid in retrospect. We saw several different herbivorous mammals including zebra, wildebeest, and sprinbok.
Before long, it was time to get another fire going for the potjie. The process took several hours, but Charles proved himself to be an excellent potjie master. It was labour intensive work, but the end-product was worth all the effort; it was delicious and the meat so soft it literally fell from the bone with the smallest biting force. We served it with sticky jasmine rice which I prepared with significantly less skill requirements apart from operating a rice cooker.
We may have drunk even more on the second night than on the first. Some people came dangerously close to missing dinner altogether, and the hot tub began to look like a questionable environment for anyone who was even slightly incapacitated. If there is ever a good time to be surrounded by doctors, I suppose that is one of them.
We relaxed, played games and listened to music of decidedly variable quality. We talked, often about nothing of great importance. There is something necessary about that kind of conversation. Friendship cannot consist entirely of updates, plans and purposeful exchanges. Sometimes it needs several hours in which nothing is accomplished and no particular conclusion is reached. After the intensity of the preceding months, it felt good to let go a little and just relax in each other's company.
The weather changed dramatically overnight. On our final morning, rain poured down and sleet and snow were forecast along the route home. We revived ourselves with scrambled eggs, leftovers and strong coffee, packed the cars and set off.
We did, in fact, drive through falling snow, which felt surreal after hiking in summer-like heat the day before.
The plan was to meet at Piggly Wiggly for lunch. Unfortunately, I took a wrong turn, despite feeling that I ought to know the roads better after having cycled there before. Lana and I ended up on a dirt road, where the car became thoroughly stuck in the mud. We spent about half an hour trying to free it before a kind farmer arrived and pulled us out. It was an undignified detour, but at least it gave the others something to laugh about when we eventually reached lunch.
Afterwards, everyone scattered home to prepare for the working week. I still had to make a trip to the airport before returning home, completely exhausted. It had taken an absurd amount of planning for us to spend barely two days in the mountains. Calls had to align, ward work had to be completed, flights had to be caught et cetera.
But perhaps that was precisely why the weekend mattered. For a short while, eight junior doctors could step away from the wards, eat too much, drink wine, climb part of a mountain and talk late into the night. We had a little bit room to remember that our lives are occasionally larger than the hospital.
I would like to return to the Drakensberg at least once more this year. There is still so much to see, and we barely scratched the surface of the hiking. For this weekend, though, the short walk, the long conversations and the low social optionality were enough.
