It strikes while you walk in Cape Town, smoking your cigar, after having the greasiest, cholesterol-filled food ever imagined.
A pain shoots through your chest, you are short of breath – the literature that you were once forced to read while you were waiting for some sort of service – tells you are having a heart attack.
You start coughing – deep throaty once – that the magazine article told you might buy you time while you experience cardiac arrest.
Someone helps you – you get to a hospital and they get you stable – but you are in need of a doctor. “The best cardiologist in this town, please,” you tell them.
“That’ll be dr. Basson,” they tell you. You nod and doze off.
You wake up a day later. Dr. Basson had done something to you arteries and you should be able to live another three or four decades, if you watch your diet etc etc etc…
Dr. Basson comes in. He looks familiar, but you are so grateful, you thanks him, saying his name over and over again.
“Ag, call me Wouter,” he says.
Dr. Wouter Basson was involved in the apartheid government’s Project Coast, which produced various drug, teargas and other chemical agents used in crowd control and against enemies in the Border War during the 80’s.
An never-to-be confirmed rumour that he engineered the Aids virus was also circulating a decade or so ago.
He was tried on a few dozen charges and found not guilty.
I wonder who seeks him out for treatment – how many patients he has – who they are. Are there black and coloured people sitting in his waiting room and what goes through their minds as he’s alone with them with so many chemicals and other medical things.
Do they trust him to cut them open? I need to trust me doctor, and with one nicknamed Dr. Death, not sure he cuts it.
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