As our two-year rental lease neared its end, Daniel’s health was deteriorating again. By then, he could no longer walk without crutches, and he struggled to navigate the stairs to our second-floor apartment. He vehemently opposed my suggestion that we leave the South Coast and move closer to the bigger hospitals, where neurosurgeons and better scanning facilities were available, to ensure that he could receive better care for his back problems. He knew a third back operation was out of the question, so he used the hospital shuttle between the South Coast and Durban for check-ups and to collect his medication.
We moved to a beachfront flat in beautiful Mtwalume, where Sheila’s husband owned a block of flats that was still under construction. He offered us one of the apartments for free, for as long as we wanted to stay. We loved the view and only had to walk across the street for an early-morning swim in the tide pool, but then we realised we couldn't work online. In that area, internet lines with sufficient data caps were not yet available. We were so disappointed. In the end, we decided to move closer to Port Shepstone, where these services were available, and we would also be closer to the regional hospital with its trauma centre.
But (there is always a but) the landlord and I just could not see eye to eye about various issues. I refused to sign the “standard rental contract”, whose clauses were entirely in the landlord’s favour and left the tenant vulnerable in a dispute. He tried to pull the wool over the eyes of a tenant who knew her rights. In 2017, I moved my family out, and we found a suitable rental just across the river in the Sea Park area.
It was a double-storey, thatched-roof house in a security complex which ideally suited our lifestyle. All the tenants were older people, retirees, which inspired Daniel to rename the complex Coffin Dodgers’ Park (CDP). According to him, the tenants were just waiting to die or trying to dodge the grave.
In CDP, the houses were close together, and the tenants could greet each other without poking their noses out the door. Of course, Daniel immediately charmed the ladies, picked up on the gossip and always had company. I put a little bench outside the front door, and whoever wanted to drop in for tea or share a juicy story was welcome.
Sometimes he went missing, but not for long. I only had to shout, and someone would tell me where they'd last seen him. Someone always kept an eye on him. Karen and I used this companionship to our advantage and went for a swim in the gorgeous Anerley, Southport and Umtentweni tide pools whenever we could. Those beaches were so close together that we could visit all three in one day. We joined a group of people who walked for charity once a week, and walk we did, between five and seven kilometres a day, on a new route every week. These walks covered the whole stretch of beach from Hibberdene to Port Edward.
In between the scheduled walks, we visited the beautiful national parks. Oribi Gorge was one of our favourites, and we visited it often. Karen put her camera to good use, and we filled a few hard drives with our beautiful memories. Corné came to visit often and, with his help, even Daniel was able to go rock fishing.
During this period, we still serviced a few customers on our self-hosted server, and Karen took on new clients, but we rarely left the South Coast and mostly worked only when we felt like it. I loved showing off our photos and sharing our tales on my other blog site, Dis Ekke, and we formed a group of writers who took part in blog challenges, with me as the spearhead. We even founded our own fantasy town, which gave bloggers a chance to escape when real life became too much.
Imagine the closeness and love among a group of mostly women from all over the country, writing and reading together and forming a friendship we thought was cast in concrete, even though most of us had never met in real life.
Imagine the shock and the hurt when the sands started shifting beneath this friendship. Somebody said something wrong, somebody did something wrong, somebody initiated a breakup... I don’t even know what really went wrong, but I remember the hurt and shock when the fantasy shattered toward the end of 2019. This was the end of one of the happiest periods in my life.
I felt physically sick and so exhausted. I was always prone to nosebleeds, whether I was suffering from the mildest cold or the most intensely fierce sense of rejection and hurt. I was not feeling well at all, and I ended the challenges, walked away from the fantasy and licked my wounds in private. I also battled endless nosebleeds, and both my GP and an ENT he referred me to tried to cauterise the little bleeder in my nose with silver nitrate, to no avail.
And then COVID happened.
My bleeding nose and I ended up in a private hospital in Port Shepstone on the evening of Good Friday, 10 April 2020. The ER doctor took me straight through to the day-clinic surgery ward because I was showering everyone with blood in the ER. They put me on a drip and somehow managed to stuff what felt like a double-bed linen sheet into my nasal passage... well, that is what it felt like. Then they started phoning around for an ENT.
But what do you know? The only ENT who should have been available was away on a family trip for the long weekend. So they sent away my blood samples to the lab to test for COVID, and for the next five days I remained the only patient in that surgical ward.
It was so cold.
My Lord, I will never forget that terrible cold. Remember, after all these years, I was still suffering from the chemotherapy legacy, which prevented my body from regulating its own temperature. Nobody wanted to get too close to me because of COVID. My test results wouldn't be available until the following Tuesday. Not even my daughter was allowed to see me then.
So I called Karen on my cellphone and asked her to deliver water or whatever I needed to drink to the entrance of the trauma unit. They delivered the water and the eaties she brought, and my meals, which came in Styrofoam containers with long, outstretched arms. Thank God for that brave nurse who pitched up every now and then to change my IV. Unbeknownst to me, the ENT was treating me over the telephone, and he prescribed medication that was administered by means of IV drips.
How in the hell could I have got COVID? I kept explaining that we had lived in solitary confinement since the first rumours of COVID started because I had a very sick man living in my house. All our groceries were delivered, we kept to ourselves, and nobody was allowed to visit.
But they would not listen to me.
The lab hurried through my test results early on Tuesday morning, and I was allowed back into civilisation. I called Karen to bring my hairdryer, shouted at the nurses, and later at the ENT who came to see me. I was thoroughly pissed off.
Then I was allowed to shower, and I washed my hair. For once, I got a decent meal and a cup of hot tea, and the ENT promised to have me in the theatre first thing on Wednesday morning.
When he saw me on Wednesday, he told me I looked lovely. Of course I did. I had a longed-for bath, and my beautiful long hair had been washed and blow-dried. But I was not in the mood for niceties.
Afterwards, he explained that the little bleeds had been properly cauterised and, as a special favour, he pushed my previously skewed septum into place to keep my nasal passage from closing up. I gave him a big smile because, for as long as I could remember, I had always had this one blocked nasal passage, and I used nasal drops every day.
And he was telling the truth. I could breathe normally for the first time in my life.
Soon, our president gave us permission to go fishing on the beach. Only those beachgoers who carried valid fishing licences and fishing rods were allowed on the beach. I never really thought of fishing as a sport that I would take to, but let me tell you, during the next few weeks of the COVID scare, I blossomed into an excellent fisher. We were on the beach from sunrise to sunset.
Nobody in CDP fell prey to COVID, and soon enough our lives returned to normal.
Featured photo: Jac and Karen fishing on Mtwalume Beach after a storm which left debris on the beach.
Afrikaans: https://thebraidedecho.co.za/af/2026/09/14/verlaat-paradys-oorleef-covid/
“… and soon enough our lives returned to normal”. I recall these events from your posts at the time. Oddly though, life has never ‘really’ returned to normal since COVID – more’s the shame. I’m sorry too that the stories written by the group of you came to an end as I enjoyed reading them 🙂 🙂
Yes, it is a pity that a group of mature people were not able to iron out their differences. Even after all these years some of the bad feelings are still making themselves felt.
I don’t think normal after covid is anything like the normal we once knew. Ja, nê…if only..
No, come to think of it, we were once again able to go anywhere we liked, we could go shopping and visit friends, but it was another kind of normal. The thing is – COVID caused a mindset change that we embraced as our “new normal”. I think COVID changed something in many of us that we didn’t quite know how to put into words at the time. We came out the other side with a different idea of what really matters. We had been forced to slow down, to live with uncertainty, and to realise just how quickly the ordinary things we took for granted could disappear. Somehow, that became our “new normal”, not simply because the world had changed, but because we had changed with it.
For me, it brought a reassessment of values and relationships. Some became more precious, some became less important, and some perhaps revealed themselves for what they had always been. We became more conscious of time, of the people we wanted beside us, and of the freedom to decide what was worth our energy. In a strange way, COVID gave us permission to stop living entirely by the old rules and to make a few new ones of our own.