Cape Town - A day after getting discharged from Tygerberg Hospital, following a left arm amputation, Jeremy Wayne Rose painted his entire bedroom white to resemble an art studio. A day and a half later, he completed his first post-operative painting.
For more than three years, Rose, 32, has had to tote a non-functioning left arm around, the weight causing physical and psychological strain.
Accompanying the weight was excruciating pain every 20 seconds, causing his entire body to contort. The Goodwood resident, 32, was teaching English in Hanoi, Vietnam, when he got involved in an accident one night three years ago, leaving him severely injured and trapped in a rice paddy.
“I woke up there and could smell blood and I was quite panicked. I yelled out for help to try to figure out if somebody could actually help me.”
The impact had severed his brachial artery and nerve, forcing him to crawl using his right arm and leg only, with his entire left side incapacitated.
“Because I was trying to get up, I kept sliding back down and it was four to five metres high. Every time I slid back down, I kept saying, ‘this is it, you’re going to die right here’.”
A nearby street light made his outstretched hand from the embankment visible to a biker who stopped to help.
“The hospital was crazy, it was frightening. There were people chained up next to me in their beds, because they were obviously criminals.”
Through a Backabuddy campaign and selling paintings, Wayne Rose was able to raise enough funds for the R45 000 operation to have the arm surgically removed on July 21.
“Since it happened (surgery), the energy has come back to me. A lot of life has returned. I just think now I can run with my dog, I can play soccer. I did a soccer trick today I haven’t done in three years,” Rose said.
“A lot of people were (saying) ‘don’t cut it off’. I was like listen, you don’t know what I’m going through – to carry this weight constantly.”
Since the operation, his painting style has changed, enabling him to paint more, and he believes it was “a blessing having the arm removed”.
“I’m accepting more of my ailment. But I am using it in a sense to create newer work now. From an emotional standpoint, I am far happier now.”
With all forms of identification lost during the ordeal, Rose’s mother, Pauline Rose, said she found out of the incident, after seeing an image of her son in hospital on a Facebook page for expats in Vietnam.
