“At some point she was so sick that I wanted to give up. I thought she would die, but today I’m happy that my little girl has made it.”
|||Cape Town - Three-year-old Ventacia Jafta is familiar to medical staff at the newly-renovated Burns Unit at Red Cross Children’s Hospital.
When the Cape Argus photographer walks towards her, she pulls away from her mother, Linray. She has been resting following a painful dressing procedure to her tiny frame, but she manages to smile for pictures.
This does not last long before she buries her face into her mother’s chest once more. Her body is still sore from the burn wounds she suffered at her Atlantis home a month ago.
Ventacia was playing at home when her arm got entangled in an electric frying pan that had hot water in it.
The pan tipped over, spilling the water on her, burning her neck, torso, arms and back - an area that amounted to 27 percent of her body surface. Her injuries and weakened immune system later led to her suffering a bacterial cross-infection and pneumonia in hospital, which landed her in the intensive care unit, and her being on a ventilator.
“At some point she was so sick that I wanted to give up. I thought she would die, but today I’m happy that my little girl has made it and that we will be going home soon,” said her mother.
Last week, Ventacia enjoyed her birthday party with friends and family in hospital - thanks to the dedication of staff at that unit.
But she is just one of the many patients that stream to the unit every year. According to hospital spokeswoman Lauren O’Connor-May, winter is the busiest time of the year for the unit, which treats about 1 300 patients a year.
The number of admissions during this time of the year increases by between 60 and 80 percent, the hospital says.
Dr Roux Martinez, a burns doctor at the unit, who has been treating Ventacia for the past four weeks, said about 75 percent of the burns patients presented to the unit suffered hot water burns, with 60 percent of these related to tipped electric kettles, which children often pulled by the cords.
“Some of these burns are so serious that children die before they make it to hospital. Because children pull these from the top while their necks are stretched they tend to inhale the hot steam or swallow the hot water. Because their airways are so fragile they swell quickly and close up, resulting in breathing difficulties and sudden death,” she said.
Apart from kettle accidents, Martinez said the unit was also seeing more burns related to burst hot water bottles and electrical burns - where children either chewed electrical cables or stuck their hands in vandalised street lights.
The average size of burns the hospital treated was anything between 10 and 35 percent of the body surface - injuries considered so significant in other African countries that “if a child suffers more than 30 percent of burns they are considered too complicated that they are just given morphine and left to die”, said Martinez.
The hospital treats some of the severe burn wounds using the cadaver skin transplant or donor skin as a biological dressing - a process that allows the skin to grow back..
sipokazi.fokazi@inl.co.za
Cape Argus