The Long Way Home to Look After Gogo

The phone call that turned the car around

I was standing in my kitchen in Observatory when my aunt phoned. She did not say hello. She just said Gogo had fallen in the yard, near the water tank, and that she had been lying there for a while before the neighbour heard her calling. My aunt is a practical woman and even she was crying, which is how I knew it was serious.

I put the phone down and looked at my little flat in Cape Town. My job, my routines, the coffee place on Lower Main where they knew my order. I had built a whole quiet life there over six years. And in about the time it takes to boil a kettle, I understood I was going to leave it.

I am twenty eight. I grew up in a small town in the Eastern Cape, the kind of place where the tar road gives up and becomes gravel just past the garage. My grandmother raised me from when I was four. My mother worked in Gqeberha and sent money, but it was Gogo who plaited my hair, who walked me to the primary school, who sat with a switch across her lap when I lied and then never actually used it. Leaving Cape Town was not a decision. It was arithmetic. There was no one else who could go, so I went.

I packed two bags, gave my landlord notice by email from the road, and drove the long way through the Karoo with the aircon broken and my heart doing something complicated the whole way.

Trying to fix it from a distance

Before I even arrived, I tried to organise things from the car, from petrol stations, from the one bar of signal you get outside Cradock. This is the part people do not warn you about. You think caring for someone is about being kind and being present. Nobody tells you it is mostly admin. It is phone calls that ring out. It is being told to phone back after two. It is phoning back after two and being told the person you need is at lunch.

Gogo had been taken to the district hospital, and I was trying to find out what the plan was, whether she needed a scan, whether her hip was broken or only bruised. From my phone I was searching for doctors in the area who could actually see her without a three week wait, because the orthopaedic clinic at the hospital only runs on certain days and the next slot felt like it was somewhere in the next season.

I filled a notebook. Actually filled it. Names of sisters at the nursing station, times, reference numbers for a file that kept going missing. I learned quickly that a file going missing is not a small thing. A file going missing means you tell the whole story again to a new stranger, the fall, the water tank, the diabetes, the blood pressure tablets she sometimes forgets, while your grandmother lies on a trolley in a corridor looking smaller than you have ever seen her.

By the time I arrived, twenty two hours after that first call, I had a list of six things to chase and a neck that had seized up from driving. Gogo was in a ward, awake, furious, and demanding to go home. That last part, at least, told me she was still herself.

The queue is the whole story

If you have never sat in a public health queue in a South African dorpie, let me describe it. You arrive before the sun. There is already a line. There are grannies on the plastic chairs with blankets over their knees and babies wrapped on their mothers' backs and a man with a bandaged hand who has clearly been there since a time that no longer feels like today. You take a number. The number means very little. You wait, and waiting becomes a kind of job you did not apply for.

I did that queue many mornings. I would get Gogo dressed slowly, because her hip still hurt and her pride hurt more, and we would go and sit. She hated it. She would say, in isiXhosa, that in her day the sister came to the house, that all this sitting was going to kill her faster than the fall did. She did not trust any of it. She did not trust the young doctor who spoke too fast. She did not trust the pills that were a different colour from last month's pills. She especially did not trust anyone who called her by her first name instead of Gogo or Mama.

And here is the thing I had to learn to hold. Her distrust was not silly. This is a woman who was moved off her land as a young girl, who lived through a system that treated her as a number for most of her life. Of course she looked at a form and a queue and saw something that had failed her before. My job was not to talk her out of that feeling. My job was to sit in it with her and still, somehow, get her the care.

A woman next to us on the bench, also there with her mother, is the one who mentioned CareKahle while we were comparing notes about referrals. I wrote it in my notebook along with everything else and we carried on complaining about the heat, the way strangers in a queue become friends for an hour and then never see each other again.

Chasing the paper trail

The referral was the beast that nearly broke me. Gogo needed to see a specialist about her hip, and the specialist was not in our town. To see the specialist she needed a referral letter from the district hospital. To get the referral letter she needed a doctor to sign it. To get the doctor to sign it she needed to be seen, which meant the queue, which meant the number that means very little.

I lost count of how many times I drove between the local facility and the bigger one an hour away, the road bad in places, the radio the only company. Once I had the referral in my hand and got all the way there only to be told it needed a stamp, an actual rubber stamp, and without the stamp it was just a piece of paper. I sat in that car park and laughed, because the other option was to cry, and I had already done that on the Karoo road.

I started keeping everything in a plastic sleeve. Every letter, every appointment card, every strip of tablets so I could show exactly what she was taking. I learned which sister to greet properly and ask after her children, because kindness moves a file faster than frustration ever will. I learned to phone the various clinics first thing in the morning when someone actually answered, and to always, always get the name of the person I spoke to.

Slowly it started to come together. A follow up appointment that actually happened. A blood test that got read by someone who then adjusted her tablets. A physiotherapy session in the next town that I booked and rebooked and finally sat through, holding her hand while she did the exercises she pretended to find pointless and then did properly when she thought I was not looking.

What the falling taught us both

It is months later now. Gogo walks with a stick she has decorated by wrapping a piece of old cloth around the handle so it does not, in her words, look like a sick person's stick. She still does not trust the whole system, and honestly, neither do I. But we have a rhythm. I know which day is clinic day. She knows I will not let her go alone and she pretends to be annoyed about that.

I gave up the Cape Town flat properly. I have a job I can do from the kitchen table, mostly, with the same bad signal I cursed on the drive in. Some evenings I miss my old life so much it sits in my chest like a stone. And then Gogo calls me to come and look at the sunset going orange behind the water tank, the same tank she fell near, and she takes my hand, and she tells me a story about my mother as a girl that I have heard forty times, and I let her tell it like it is new.

What I have learned is that arranging care is not one heroic act. It is a hundred small stubborn ones. It is queues and stamps and phone calls and plastic sleeves. It is loving someone enough to fight a system on their behalf while also respecting that they have every reason to fear it. It is coming the long way home and finding out that home was never the flat in Observatory. It was always this woman, in this yard, calling my name.