Sister Sandra Bryant runs her clinic in a lilac painted room, where glitter cream and a disco ball does not seem out of place next to scissors, syringes, and needles. She tells Spotlight's Biénne Huisman about working with Professor Christiaan Barnard, the adrenaline of being in the operating theater, and why she has a tattoo of an anatomical heart.
Beside the Gardens fly-over bridge in central Cape Town, inside the Chinn's Corner Pharmacy, Sister Sandra Bryant runs her clinic in a lilac painted room - where she switches on a disco ball to set young patients at ease. On the walls, there are dog pictures and craft butterflies; lilac shelves are lined with equipment, dispensers and wrapped needles in jars. She keeps soap bubbles and glitter cream too - for easing young nerves.
"I've got special things that I do for children," says Bryant, long blue and purple hair coiled on her head. "When they walk in to have an injection, I say: 'I'm going to put on the magic light for you'. I also have special cream that I mixed with glitter, and I say to the little kids: 'Come, you're going to get a mermaid skin before we put your injection in, because that makes sure that you don't have any pain'."
Bryant lives by the maxim "if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." At 75, she opens her clinic - in the pharmacy, next to a Thai massage parlour, a block from the Gardens skateboard park - at 8am daily for booked consultations and walk in cases. Here she sees up to thirty patients a day; ranging from "diamonds to rags", they derive from the affluent suburb of Oranjezicht, all the way to informal dwellings along Buitenkant Street.
These days Bryant specialises in trauma work, wound care and suturing, and is known to unlock the pharmacy on Sundays to treat pub injuries from Saturday nights. She keeps a donation box, for treating vulnerable people, who she helps free of charge.
Before our interview, Bryant's door is shut. After some minutes, it opens and a woman steps out, thick glasses framing her eyes. Face cast down, the woman asks about payment, to which Bryant responds: "pay it forward". A man waiting on a chair rises and Bryant tells him cheerfully: "Your wife isn't dying any time soon."
'Brilliant but rude'
Just over four decades ago, from 1981 until 1982, Bryant worked as a scrub nurse (responsible for maintaining a sterile field during surgery) beside Professor Christiaan Barnard as he performed heart transplants at Groote Schuur Hospital, adjacent to the University of Cape Town.
"He was a wonderful, wonderful surgeon. It was like listening to a symphony, watching his hands work. He was brilliant. But he had the rudest manners," she recalls.
Shrugging, Bryant adds that she did not dwell on his rudeness, and later having his name on her CV landed her top jobs in England. "Boy, did that name open doors for me!" she recalls.
Barnard made headlines around the world after performing the first successful human-to-human heart transplant in 1967. At the time, Bryant was still a first-year nursing student at Groote Schuur. After her three year nursing degree, she studied an additional year to specialise in midwifery; which earned her the green bar on her epaulettes, she explains.
In 1979, also at Groote Schuur, Bryant completed a diploma in operating theater science - "my passion, from the very get go," she says. "The blood and the gore and the adrenaline and excitement of it. Me being the obsessive compulsive person that I am, it suited my personality perfectly."
Eyebrows raised in the small lilac room, she points at her shelves. "Because if you look at my cupboard; there are scissors, syringes, needles, all in neat and tidy rows. I can come in here blindfolded and find what I need."
After two years on Barnard's team, Bryant says she was recruited to run the cardiothoracic (surgical procedures within the chest, including on the heart and lungs) unit at City Park Hospital in Cape Town's Bree Street, later renamed the Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital. In 1995, she took a retrenchment package, leaving the public sector to work in the private sector.
She does not mince words outlining the difference she experienced in income: "I managed to save well, because I earned a sh*tload of money when I was in private practice. Because I worked as a private nurse practitioner, I charged them my price. And because there are very few of us around, they paid my price."
For most of her 25 years at Life Vincent Pallotti Hospital in Pinelands, she worked with another well-known heart surgeon, Dr Willie Koen.
Bryant describes Koen as a "mensch". During our interview, she lifts her top to display a tattoo of an anatomical heart on the skin of her chest.
"He, Dr Willie Koen drew this for me on a serviette, and he signed it for me and I had all that tattooed on my chest. And I said, that's the biggest accolade I can give to you as a man, whom I've admired and worked for," says Bryant.
She also worked with shoulder and elbow specialist Dr Basil Vrettos for about 20 years. In 2020, as COVID-19 struck, Bryant says her work at Life Vincent Pallotti, and other private hospitals, was terminated, partially because she was considered to be at high risk of severe illness and death should she contract the virus.
According to Gavin Pike, Life Vincent Pallotti Hospital manager, Bryant was employed permanently at the facility until February 2018. "Thereafter she continued to work at the facility through a nursing agency. We can confirm that all Life Healthcare hospitals ceased using agency nursing services at the initial stages of the pandemic, for a period, due to the postponement of elective procedures to prioritize COVID-19 patients," he tells Spotlight.
Bryant says losing her job was "like being thrown out of a spaceship with no parachute".
"It was the end of March and I decided to take a two week holiday and think. And then one day I walked past the door of this pharmacy, and the pharmacist Saul Helman shouts to me: 'Sands, come work for me!"'
'Everyone's mum'
Helman has managed the Alpha Pharm Chinn's Corner Pharmacy since 2001, encouraging a "family environment". Bryant has her own keys to the premises, and can open it up to treat patients outside trading hours at her discretion. One patient, a young women dressed in sportswear - who drops by for a vitamin B injection, tells Spotlight: "Sandy is everyone's mum, we all have her number."
Despite Bryant's charitable endeavours, her clinic is one of the pharmacy chain's most profitable. She points out a certificate on her door, hailing Chinn's Pharmacy as "a best financially performing clinic", awarded earlier this year.
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She adds that she keeps in touch with Koen and his heart transplant team. On Women's Day, August 9, she joined Koen and his twenty staff on a trip to Simon's Town by rail. "They still invite me along; because the people there, well I taught them." She takes out her phone, scrolling to pictures of the excursion.
Commenting on challenges facing nursing as a profession in South Africa, she says nursing used to be a career pursued for passion, whereas nowadays many saw it purely as a salaried job. "There's no respect anymore; not for doctors or anybody. We were taught to be respectful; that's a long time ago and one can't get stuck in the past, things have changed. But for example, I never called Willie by his name in theatre, it was Dr Koen. Then afterwards in the pub it would be Willie and Sandy."
Born in Pinelands in Cape Town and raised in De Aar, where her mother worked as a nurse and her father as a cold storage engineer, Bryant attended high school in Cradock. Today she lives in Gardens, a few steps away from Chinn's Corner Pharmacy with her two wire fox terriers.
Our interview ends when Helman knocks on the door, gently announcing a walk-in patient waiting outside.
*This article is part of Spotlight's 2024 Women in Health series featuring the remarkable contributions of women to medicine and science.
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