“NO doctor, I’m not losing these hearing aids,” an octogenarian world-renown Black South African, retorted obdurately to a proposal from an ear, nose and throat surgeon, a Jew in his early forties, that he accede to his hearing aids being replaced by a pair of new state-of-the-art digital ones which could be programmed for his specific pattern of hearing loss.
“But they’re very old,” countered the surgeon – to which the elderly patient protested, “No doctor, that’s not the point. These hearing aids were donated to me when I came out of prison, and I don’t want to seem ungrateful to the people who gave them to me. And so, doctor, I’m going to stick with them. My answer is no!”
The moment had been preluded by a phone call to the surgeon from a colleague of his, who happened to be the elder’s personal physician, on one Sunday afternoon in 2001, in which the caller requested the receiver to go and attend to the luminary whom he indicated to had been experiencing difficulty of hearing!
Champing at the opportunity – having actually previously broached the subject of the old man needing the latest digital hearing technology, with the physician – the surgeon excitedly acquiesced forthwith, culminating in him driving to the elder’s residence in the Johannesburg suburb of Houghton where he proceeded to remove wax from the patient’s ears and tested the outmoded hearing aids he’d been relying on for some twenty years, which he diagnosed to contain shortcomings!
The surgeon remedying of the spot of bother induced gratitude from the relieved patient who teased: “Now, doctor, I am going to hear all the things I should not be hearing.”
It flabbergasted the surgeon concerning how a patient who exhorted others to be disciplined in order to benefit from their hearing aids no longer had the capacity to maintain his, himself. The preceding decade, he had been unashamed about his own loss – encouraging adults and children
with hearing impairment thus: “I would like to tell you that I also wear hearing aids, just as you do.
And to get the improvements in communication that made it possible requires the understanding, expertise, love and dedication of family, friends, members of the community and health professionals.” Now, in Houghton, the surgeon observed that the loss of this important function had been relegated to a less than urgent issue by his minders!
Presently, at his hearing clinic at Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg alongside his colleague, a speech pathologist named Shamim Ebrahim, the surgeon, named Dr Peter Friedland, found himself having to persuade the resisting patient, viz, Nelson Mandela – whose personal aide, viz, Zelda la Grange, alluded to as having been ‘religiously holy about’ his hearing aids, in her memoir, Good Morning Mr Mandela – to upgrade his aids, even reminding him that his confrère, ex-US president Bill Clinton had incurred hearing loss from playing the saxophone and using hunting rifles, and has since 1997 been wearing hearing aids, to which South Africa’s erstwhile president obstinately retorted: “no doctor, I didn’t see him wearing hearing aids!”
It would only be after Friedland pointed out to Mandela that Clinton’s in-the-canal (ITC) devices fit deep in his ears – which explained why the elderly statesman couldn’t detect them – that he eventually conceded, averring: “okay doctor, you have made a persuasive argument. I will listen to you.” But during this consultation, Friedland and Ebrahim fitted him with a pair of undetectable tiny devices which proved difficult for Mandela to remove due to his arthritis-induced swollen fingers – a conundrum which prompted Mandela to remark: “No doctor, you see, I don’t care if people see that I wear hearing aids.” Whereupon Friedland had appropriate ones made for him, which he could insert and remove effortlessly!
Furthermore, the doctor made available a remote frequency- modulated system which picked up sound in a room or from microphones and transmitted it directly to the hearing aids, augmented by a hearing loop he had to wear around his neck and which would be tuned into the device’s Wi-Fi.
Friedland had deduced that Mandela’s hearing decline had been exacerbated by noise-induced hearing loss incurred during his incarceration on Robben Island where he spent years breaking up stones with a hammer and chisel and pick and shovel. Exposure to lengthy periods of high decibels inevitably resulted in damage to his hearing. Having been given a pair of the hearing aids upon his release which he went on to wear out throughout his presidency, Friedland noticed that towards the end of his term, his hearing had become an issue which required a technological upgrade of the aids – hence his approaching Mandela’s personal physician, viz Professor Mike Plitt.
Post the initial house call to Mandela’s Houghton residence, Plitt requested Friedland to extend it to additional weeks during which the surgeon secured years’ worth of batteries for the hearing aids and trained one of the housekeepers to change them and clean them.
Additionally, the surgeon performed a hearing assessment geared toward ensuring that his patient benefitted from the best possible technological option, i.e., insofar as keeping intrusive background noise in check.
The tome narrates beyond mere doctor-and-patient engagement since it divulges anecdotes such as can only be shared by confidantes who have taken each other into their respective confidences!
Such as when, at Mandela’s request, Friedland answered his phone only to discover that the call was from Russian President Vladimir Putin, or the incident when President Robert Mugabe stood up Mandela for a meeting, causing the latter to take off his watch and hand it to the latecomer whilst uttering: “President Mugabe, here is a gift because either you don’t have one of these or yours doesn’t function!” – and promptly left!
For Friedland to become one of the fortunate who’d be accepted into Madiba’s inner sanctum, one would have to retrospect to a Friday evening of February 1991 when Friedland was still an SADF medic suddenly instructed to ‘set up medical facilities to manage the assassination attempt’ at the Johannesburg Country Club where Madiba and President FW de Klerk were due to receive a joint media award.
A military senior of his had informed him that he had received intel regarding an assassination attempt on Mandela, with a brief further instructing him to be stationed immediately behind Mandela on a stage – with only a curtain separating them – effectively aligning him to any line of fire which would ensue!
Whilst on duty at this occasion, Friedland – a King David High School alumnus who used to invite speakers such as The World newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Percy Qoboza and Dr Connie Mulder, et al, to assembly to educate students about the horrors of apartheid – eavesdropped some army personnel venting their spleens in Afrikaans at De Klerk for ‘selling them out’ through his February 2, 1990 speech, and observed them being affronted by the sight of Mandela arriving in a red Mercedes-Benz (which East London assembly plant workers had built for him free of charge as their token of gratitude) surrounded by his own security detail!
On the eve of Friedland and his family’s emigration to Australia in late 2008, prompted by the brutal murders of three of his close acquaintances owing to South Africa’s prevalent crime, he went to see Madiba to inform him of his decision, whereupon the icon told him about a regrettable mistake he made whilst visiting Australia in October 1990, during which an Aboriginal leader chastised him for showing up only to kowtow at the White man’s table (at a state dinner in Canberra) whilst ignoring the indigenous people of the country.
“And so doctor, I want to tell you, don’t think you are so clever. Make sure you thoroughly study the places you are going to, the history and all its people,”
Madiba concluded in a remark the surgeon deciphered as a hint of his patient’s blessing for him to leave!
Professor Peter Friedland is a leading ear, nose and throat surgeon and holds the academic chair in this discipline in Western Australia.
Most of his career was spent in South Africa, where he was clinical head of the department of ENT at the University of the Witwatersrand Donald Gordon Medical Centre.
This memoir is materialized with the assistance and encouragement of his sister, Jill Margo, a biographer and medical journalist.
A trade paperback, Quiet Time with The President is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores, it retails for R280.
