Impossible is Nothing

By Rowena Webb

When you are diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening condition, it is advisable to follow doctor's orders to the letter. For Rowena, managing her Type I diabetes from the tender age of nine was a cinch, until she became a rebellious, invincible teenager, embarking on a rampage of self-destruction and completely ignoring all doctor's orders. Cigarettes, alcohol and (eventually) drugs were welcomed into her life with reckless abandon, until one day her body gave her the middle finger.

With her blood sugar levels spiralling out of control, Rowena found herself in renal failure and on the waiting list for a donor kidney. While on dialysis, and still smoking up a storm, vascular disease set in, and she watched with horror as her feet and legs began decomposing in front of her eyes.

Now a double amputee with her health resting on a knife's edge every day, Rowena has journeyed to the deepest, darkest depths of everything and anything that can go wrong (and back again).

Motivational speaker, successful businesswoman, and an inspiration to many, Rowena, with her candid sense of humour and uncontrollable zest for life, is living proof that it is indeed possible to rise up against the odds and lead a relatively normal life, provided your head and heart are in the right place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rowena Webb
• Release date: Mar 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386707967

Book preview

1

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

The best way for me to tell you my story is to tell it forwards.

I could have told you my story backwards and spent a great deal of time exploring and reminiscing on the lessons I have learned up until now, but I will save that pleasure for the end. That way I can be assured of your undivided attention right up until the very last word. I am a bit of a control freak, so I will ask that you simply humour me as I share my story with you.

I am no angel. I certainly didn’t arrive at this point in my life because I played my cards right. While the end result was, in hindsight, entirely predictable, my journey has been far too complex to be represented in a way that is anything other than a melding of complete chaos with reckless abandon.

So allow me, dear reader, to start at the very beginning.

I was nine years old when the doctor told my mother I had diabetes. Juvenile diabetes. The one where your pancreas doesn't produce insulin, and you have to inject the stuff into the fatty tissue just beneath your skin to keep the sugar levels in your body in check.

I attended St Cyprian’s School for Girls, an Anglican all-girls school in Cape Town, South Africa. It was one of those afternoons where the teacher had been called out of the classroom, leaving a roomful of mischievous young girls to sit quietly and behave until she returned. Within minutes we had scrambled on to our desks, and in fits of giggles, we were leaping across the room from one desk to another playing catch.

It didn’t take long before I lost my footing and fell crashing to the floor, a shooting pain extending up my arm like wildfire. I lay on the floor as my friends gathered around me, staring helplessly as I writhed in agony, the room now silent, overturned chairs scattered across the floor.

My mother was called in immediately, and she rushed me to our family doctor’s rooms. Doctor Khan, still practising medicine at the grand old age of ninety-two, while concerned about my broken arm, was somewhat disturbed by my pallor complexion, not entirely convinced that it was a direct result of the fall.

Would you mind if we ran a few tests on your daughter? he asked my mother, while simultaneously flashing a small torch into my eyes.

I had been in and out of doctors rooms in the past year, moving from one specialist to another. I had always been a very active child with a love for swimming and sport in general, but the previous twelve months had seen me become thin and lethargic, struggling with what felt like a constant thirst, and a very dry skin. Most of the specialists had attributed my condition to growing pains, and my parents had ascribed my dry skin to the chlorine in the swimming pools. But Doctor Khan had a niggling feeling that all was not entirely well with me.

A battery of sugar and urine tests later and it was confirmed: I was a Type 1 diabetic.

My mother was in tears, and my father was equally upset, especially when Doctor Khan told them that my sugar levels were so high that he was surprised that I had not gone into a diabetic coma earlier in the year.

The ketones in Rowena’s urine are very high, he said, noticeably concerned. The ketones are being produced by her liver because there is not enough insulin to help her body use sugar for energy. Her blood sugar levels are sitting at twenty-two, and the normal range is between five and seven. She needs insulin immediately.

Despite the emotional upheaval that was unravelling in Dr Khan’s rooms that morning, I really could not see what all the fuss was about. I remember looking at my mother as she sat weeping and saying to her, rather matter-of-factly, I’m not going to die, Mom, I haven’t got cancer. I’m going to be fine.

And with that, I swiftly reached out and grabbed the syringe from the doctor's hands and took a stab at my thigh with the needle, giving myself my first insulin injection. See, Mom, you don’t need to worry, I said, I can do this myself.

2

GROWING UP

Iwas born in Riverlea in Johannesburg, South Africa on the fifteenth of September 1975, and I was there when it snowed for the first time in September 1981. I remember the snow because our family packed up and relocated to Cape Town shortly thereafter.

My mother often told me that I was her birthday present because I was born the day before her birthday.

My mother was born in Kimberley, South Africa, into a family of thirteen brothers and sisters. Her parents were both in their second marriages. My mother was Coloured. Her mother, my maternal grandmother, was White, and her father, my maternal grandfather, was Indian.

My mother was the captain of the Transvaal Hockey team.

She was a seamstress by trade, and, during the time that my family lived in Johannesburg, she made curtains for Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto. My second-oldest sister, Natalie, was actually born at Baragwanath Hospital during my mother’s tenure there.

My mother often told me that I was a privileged child because I was the only child out of my three siblings who was born at the Marymount Hospital, which, at the time, was a well-known private hospital in Johannesburg.

My father was an only child. He was born in Mount Frere in the Eastern Cape.

My grandfather, my father’s father, was White. My father never actually met his father or knew who his father was. All he knew was that his father was a German soldier and that he had inherited his father’s green eyes and fair skin. My father’s mother, my paternal grandmother, was Coloured.

My father was one of the captains of the Black Springboks and played Transvaal Rugby and has had books written about him. He featured in Forgotten Heroes, a book written about non-white South African sportsmen.

He was the first coloured president of The Trade Union Council of South Africa (TUCSA) from 1975-1981, which was originally, back in the 1960s, a trade union for skilled workers, purely because, due to laws at the time, Black trade unions were not permitted to register by law, and TUCSA only accepted registered trade unions, which meant that Black trade unions were excluded by default. My father stepped down in the early 1980s when TUCSA became the South African Trade Union Council (SACTU).

My father became a member of PW Botha’s President’s Council and Economic Advisory Council back in the 1980s.

The President’s Council eventually disbanded and my father, who no longer wanted to be involved in politics, opened a food shop in Observatory in Cape Town. He eventually sold the food shop and spent the later years of his life serving on the boards of directors of many large companies in South Africa.

During the Apartheid years, most of my mother’s brothers and sisters, who had initially been classified as Coloured in terms of South Africa’s racial colour chart, had themselves reclassified as White because of their light skin tones. My mother did not go this route, along with three of her siblings, and retained her Coloured status.

None of my extended family was based in Cape Town when I was a child, so I never really grew up with grandparents or aunts and uncles and cousins. The white side of my family, although it is not difficult to see that they were painted with a few strands of the tar brush—based on photos that I have seen of them on social media—is not part of my life, and I have never personally met them.

I attended private schools and do not, as my colleagues at the office often say, sound like a normal Cape Coloured person. We were not a traditional Coloured family, in other words, from the Cape Flats, with missing teeth and a command of the popular phrase, complete with accent, of Jou ma se poes. But believe me, there are times when I do say, Jou ma se… in all its glory. But it’s not part of my every day vernacular.

3

CHILDHOOD ABUSE

My sister believed that my diabetes was brought on by shock.

I started developing breasts when I was nine years old. It was both a blessing and a curse, the reasons for which I will divulge shortly.

Lifelong friends of my parents had travelled to Cape Town to spend a few weeks of holiday time with our family. My parents were running their food shop at the time and were unable to take as much time off work as they would have liked to, which meant that my siblings and I were often left in the care of our out of town visitors.

We had returned from a trip to the mall, and I was lying on the bed with who I will refer to as My Uncle even though he was not my uncle, while Natalie and my uncle’s wife were making breakfast in the kitchen. I was considered too young, being only nine years old at the time, to be involved in the making of the morning’s spread.

While we lay on the bed, out of sight of his wife and my siblings, my uncle was teasing me and I, the innocent child that I was, played along. Before I could begin to understand what was going on, his breathing had become laboured and heavy, and his hands were snaking across my t-shirt until they came to rest on my breasts.

At that moment, as fearless as I was generally, I froze, unable to respond, a mixture of terror and anger and confusion flooding through my veins as he fondled parts of my body that had up until that moment never been touched in such an intimate way by another human being.

I always say that my Natalie was my saving grace at that moment. Although everything was happening so quickly, time seemed to slow down, and the sounds around me had become muffled and indistinct. Until a crashing sound pierced the air. Natalie had dropped a plate in the kitchen. The fogginess disappeared, and I pushed my uncle away from me and bolted out of the bedroom. All I could think of was my mother, and I ran straight for the telephone.

My mother immediately asked me to put my uncle’s wife on the line, but I don’t remember much after that. All I know is that my uncle and his wife were packing their suitcases into their car and had left as quickly as they had arrived.

Breakfast was not served that day.

I was diagnosed with diabetes shortly afterwards, and my sister was convinced that the shock of being sexually abused had kick-started the process.

The whole incident may not seem like a big deal, but it had a huge impact on my life. Besides being a massive invasion of my privacy, I truly believe that it moulded my future relationships with men. It was probably one of the big reasons that I only started to get into relationships when I was almost twenty.