Authors: John Carlin
It was in the spirit of that historic vow that Henke made a vow of his own within minutes of his son’s birth. Just prior to the birth he had told the obstetrician that he did not mind if it was a boy or a girl so long as the child had ten fingers and ten toes. Now, having been the first to identify the feet’s deformity, Henke ceremonially held up the infant with both hands and declared, before mother, doctor and nurses: ‘This is my son Oscar and I declare before God that I shall love him and stand by him for the rest of my days.’
In practical terms, standing by their son meant Sheila and Henke Pistorius had to make a choice between amputation of his legs and
corrective surgery. They consulted eleven doctors in South Africa and overseas. Some argued for surgery on both legs; some proposed amputation of the right foot and surgery on the left. It was the advice of one particular South African doctor that tipped the balance in favor of double amputation below the knee.
The doctor’s name was Gerry Versfeld. Had Henke and Sheila Pistorius not chanced upon Dr Versfeld, a white man who at the time worked in a hospital in Soweto where only black patients were admitted, they might have lacked the confidence to go along with the most drastic option of all. Had the paths of Dr Versfeld and his infant self never crossed, the chances were that Pistorius would never have known what it is to run, would never have found fame, wealth and glory, and would never have met Reeva Steenkamp. The choice the parents made would plot the course of his life.
Pistorius had always been grateful to Dr Versfeld, the orthopaedic surgeon who carried out the operation. He had climbed so high thanks to him, and for all the head-turning acclaim he received he never forgot the man whose appearance in his life a few months after he was born had compensated so amply for the freak deficiency of his genes, directing him towards global stardom when he achieved the miracle of running in the Olympic Games.
He had had a lucky escape. If his two lower limbs had not been removed when he was very young he would have had to suffer a multitude of surgical procedures during his childhood, through to his late teens. Doctors would have had to lengthen his legs and subject him to a series of delicate and complex procedures to try and remold the mangled mess of his feet. He would have been looking at eight to ten operations over a period of sixteen to eighteen years. Even then, the finished product would have been well short of perfection. The surgeons would never have been able to re-create the arch of the
feet, or do much to diminish their clawed rigidity. The sinewy energy of his youth would have been trapped inside a severely impaired body. He would have moved about the home as old people do – able to get up to go to the bathroom, to fetch things from the kitchen, and little more. He would never have been able to run. Covering 200 meters, the distance at which he won his first gold medal in 21.97 seconds, would have taken an age. His legs would have had no spring, no push-off, as Dr Versfeld put it, when he hit the ground. All his concentrated effort would have been invested in laboriously lifting up one foot, then the other. When he was older he was able to picture it. He had come across individuals born with conditions similar to his in just one leg. They had been visibly, inescapably handicapped. He, on the other hand, had always been secure in the knowledge that when he wore long trousers few could guess that there was anything wrong with him.
His gratitude towards Dr Versfeld was enriched by mutual affection. The professional relationship between the doctor and the Pistorius family grew into a close friendship. He and his wife became regular dinner guests at the Pistorius home, where they never ceased to celebrate the choice they had made.
The alternatives had been limited and the implications lifelong. Taking the surgical route would have let his parents cling to the hope that future advances in medicine would one day yield a wonder remedy or, failing that, would at least allow the possibility of deferring amputation to a later date. Opting for amputation right away meant forcing themselves to visualize their child pinned to an operating table to have his tiny limbs sawn off. They would be condemning him to the status of an amputee, dependent on artificial legs, for the rest of his days. They might one day be held to account by a mutilated son who might never forgive them for what they had done.
The choice was between letting the surgeons play God and playing God themselves.
Dr Versfeld never wished to claim any credit for the choice Pistorius’s parents made. Whenever they thanked him, he always insisted that all he had done was to provide information; responsibility for the final decision had rested with them. Dr Versfeld was a mild, self-deprecating man, tall and slender, serenely confident in his professional abilities. The young Pistorius would have heard him scoff over dinner at his family home at the notion that he had become a surgeon out of some solemn sense of vocation. ‘It’s all because as a boy my hobby was woodwork,’ Dr Versfeld would smile. ‘At school my best subject was geometry. And then I did medicine, so it was almost a natural consequence that I should become an orthopaedic surgeon. In my woodwork I had to drill holes and cut things very accurately, measuring angles. And now that’s what I do for a living.’
But his face would turn grim as he recalled his feelings when the time came to operate on the eleven-month-old infant. He would confess later that he had struggled to preserve the mechanical detachment his profession required.
‘Keeping my emotions in check was not an easy job. It was not nice at all, but your head told you it was the right thing and you had to ensure the head won. But even so, it was a wrenching experience to chop off the limbs of a very little boy.’
Nor was his job technically easy. It was not a question simply of sawing through a bone and discarding everything below it. Dr Versfeld judged that one part of the damaged foot had to be preserved in order to help the boy retain some degree of mobility when he was not wearing the prosthetic legs on which he would depend for most, but not all, of his waking moments for the rest of his life. That part
was the heel pad, ‘nature’s cushion’, as Dr Versfeld described it, ‘very specialized tissue consisting of compact fat globules’. The objective was to salvage both heel pads – weight-bearers, like the knee – and attach them to the bottom of the truncated tibia so that, rather than being dependent solely on his prosthetics for movement, he would be able to walk short distances on his stumps. A clean cut at the bottom of the tibia without the heel pad would have made it impossible for him to get about – the skin there, lacking those fatty globules, is very fine and would have torn too easily. Lacking that support, it would have been impossible for him even to stand up without losing his balance.
In order to be able to retain those fatty skin flaps, Dr Versfeld had to cut very close to the heel bone. Using only hand instruments and the naked eye, it required all his concentrated expertise to get the whole heel out, free it from the Achilles tendon, disarticulate the ankle, remove the ligaments, and then join the heel flaps to the bottom of the tibia. The procedure – an agony for the waiting parents – lasted four hours, two for each leg. And though the ligaments, the ankle, the entirety of the tiny, twisted, concave foot were thrown, as Henke Pistorius would indelicately put it afterwards, ‘into the dustbin’, he would be able to move nimbly enough about the home on the stumpy ends of his short, thin, tapered legs.
Pistorius’s childhood would have been very different had it been decided to delay the amputation. Eleven months was the age chosen because it is around this stage that a child typically begins to take its first steps. Three months afterwards, the Pistorius parents took their son to the consulting room of Trevor Brauckmann, the prosthetics specialist in Pretoria who built and fitted his first artificial legs. The child studied the wooden pair that Brauckmann gave him with curiosity, submitted with still keener interest to seeing his stumps fitted
into the legs’ deep sockets, steadied himself by holding onto a set of parallel bars, then let go and started stumbling delightedly around the room, reveling in his new-found self-sufficiency, like any infant taking its first steps. His parents had arrived for the appointment with confused feelings of hope and self-accusation, but left overjoyed at the cheerful abandon with which their child had taken to these strange new appendages.
In the coming years he learnt to run and to play outdoor games side by side with his boisterous older brother, Carl, encouraged always by his mother who taught him to refuse to behave as if he were in any way impaired. It served him well. Had she not instilled in him this mental habit he would have lacked the gumption to imagine himself competing against the world’s fastest runners. Looking back on his childhood, he vividly recalled playing soccer on stony fields, riding mountain bikes with his big brother, climbing trees and falling off them battered and bruised, a proud little tearaway – but he tried to repress the memory of the painful sores and blisters on his stumps, so painful that there were stretches of several months when he could barely move, let alone walk, and had to stay quietly at home under his mother’s care, unable to join his friends at school.
Those unhappy episodes gave steel to his character, injected a resilience in him that Dr Versfeld celebrated when he traveled to Athens in 2004 to see him run in his first Paralympics race, cheering him on when he won that first gold medal, taking pride in the seventeen-year-old prodigy’s achievement, deriving satisfaction from the modesty with which he responded to his triumph and to the many more that would follow.
Nothing prepared the doctor for what was to happen nine years later. Never had he detected a suggestion in anything his most famous
patient had said or done during the twenty-six years he had known him that could have predicted a moment of such lethal loss of control. That person, he would tell friends, was a stranger to him. It made no sense at all.
Opting for amputation over surgery had made sense at the time, but it would turn out to be a sort of Faustian pact. Pistorius would achieve all his heart desired, but there would be a price to pay. Had Sheila and Henke Pistorius taken the route that some other doctors had suggested he would have become an entirely different person, his life would have taken an entirely different course, what happened would not have happened. Wheelchair-bound, the recurrent operations he would have been subjected to as he grew up would have meant far longer absences from school, drastically altering his personality. His mother would have struggled to persuade him that he was just another normal boy. She might have had to give up on the attempt altogether, resorting to more painstaking, less convincing means to build up his sense of self-worth. His schoolmates, seeing him wheeled into class, or at best limping badly, would have responded to him with pity, if he was lucky, or with sniggering contempt if he was not. He might have had the fortitude finally to emerge strong and wise from his predicament, but the chances are that along the way he would have felt himself to be a scorned outsider; his impulse, to hide away from the world.
That was his impulse now, after the shooting. All the misery and shame he had been spared as he grew up hit him in one concentrated bolt, at the age of twenty-six, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day in 2013. His love affair with the beautiful and worldly Reeva Steenkamp, in whose fashionable circles he would have been unlikely to have moved had he not found fame and fortune, was an achievement that told the world he had won life’s race. Ending Reeva’s life, and in the
same instant annihilating his own, had condemned him to the shadow existence he had fought so hard to avoid – inspiring compassion in some, derision in others, and ripping forever from his grasp all that he had striven with such fierce resolve to win.
3
One that loved not wisely but too well
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SHAKESPEARE
,
OTHELLO
H
IS BED
in the police cell was a blanket on a cement floor. Not that it mattered very much. He would not have slept that first night on any surface. Ever since he was a little boy he had lived in fear of criminals, now he knew what it felt like to be one. Worse was to come the next morning, Friday, February 15, when he was driven in a police convoy to a court in the center of Pretoria where he appeared before a magistrate who confirmed what he knew was coming. It took no more than five minutes for the magistrate to announce that the state would be charging him with premeditated murder. At the word ‘murder’, he broke into wild sobs. His sister, Aimée, who was sitting directly behind him with his uncle and other family members, put her hands to her face and wept. As for bail, the state opposed it and a hearing would be held at which a different magistrate would decide the matter the following Tuesday.
The name of the bail magistrate was Desmond Nair. Of Indian descent, which would have precluded him from occupying any judicial post under apartheid, he was highly experienced and respected. Magistrates and judges possess enormous power in South Africa,
where the jury system does not exist. In theory they are supposed to perform their roles with the coldest impartiality, but that does not stop both defense and prosecution lawyers from paying close scrutiny to their backgrounds in the hope of finding some vulnerability that might help swing a verdict. Pistorius’s defense lawyers clutched at what they thought might be grounds for optimism in a remarkable case from 2011 in which Nair had presided over the bail hearing.
At the center of that case was an Afrikaner rugby player called ‘Bees’ Roux, who was arrested and charged with murder for beating a black policeman to death. At a pre-trial meeting, attended by Roux and his lawyer, as well as the state prosecutor and the brother and wife of the victim, Roux expressed sincerest regret and explained what had happened. He had imagined that the policeman, whom he had encountered at night, had planned to rob him, possibly kill him. An exceptionally large man, Roux struck the policeman with force, knocking him unconscious. He sought to revive him, Roux said, but it was too late. In tears, Roux apologized to the policeman’s relatives and implored their forgiveness. They granted it. First the brother, also weeping, embraced Roux; then the policeman’s widow made a short dignified speech in which she thanked Roux for his candor and said that she did indeed forgive him. The prosecutor proposed a deal. Roux would plead guilty to culpable homicide, the South African legal term for unpremeditated manslaughter, he would pay the family of the dead policeman compensation and receive a suspended sentence of five years in jail. The presiding magistrate concurred, and Roux was a free man.