After spending eight months in hospital, Asanda Hlamandana is preparing to walk into an auditorium, not as a high-school teacher with a serious health condition but an author who lives to tell.

On Saturday 12 September the Peak View High School teacher will launch her book, Strong Is a Lonely Place: The Hidden Cost of Being the Sacrificial Lamb, at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology’s Bellville Campus Auditorium. From noon to 15:00, she’ll be in conversation with Amanda Maboza, a spoken- and written-word artist, about the book and her experiences behind it.

A shock diagnosis

Before her illness, Hlamandana believed she was taking care of herself. She had stopped drinking, was losing weight and exercising regularly. A check-up, however, revealed stage 5 renal impairment.

“I can’t be at stage 5,” she cried. “I can’t be dying!”

The diagnosis left her frightened and confused. She called her aunt and a close friend.

Months in hospital

What followed was an eight-month hospital stay. Hlamandana said there was confusion over her medical records, because doctors had not given her the full picture. She sought a second medical opinion and the seriousness of her condition became clearer. Doctors found significant fluid retention. She also developed a blister that was diagnosed as a chronic venous ulcer later.

Hlamandana said she was temporarily paralysed and used crutches to which she still uses one crutch.

Her kidney function has since improved to Stage 3A. She was not on dialysis or waiting for a transplant, but remained under medical care. The illness also forced her to confront a role she had carried since childhood.

The weight of being first

Her father died when she was 10. Her mother was 32 when she was left to raise four children, the youngest only 7 months old. As the eldest daughter, Hlamandana became the person others relied on.

“I was the first to do everything. I was the blueprint.” She grew accustomed to being seen as the one who could cope. “Asanda can take it. Asanda will take care of it.”

Her recent hospitalisation has changed all that. She needed help with things she had previously done herself. Exhaustion set in and she could no longer move as she once did. She also had to put the high heels she loved wearing aside.

The journal that became a book

During her hospital stay, a friend who had known her for years visited regularly to check on her. One day she asked him to bring her a journal. “He kept visiting. He did not have to stay, but he did”.

Hlamandana kept asking him what it was he saw in her. “I knew you before the condition,” he would answer.

That friend is now her boyfriend. What began as journalling to process her experiences became a book. “If you don’t take care of yourself, your body is going to force you to.”

Strong Is a Lonely Place explores grief, family responsibility, care giving and the cost of always putting other people first.

“I was writing during my darkest days,” Hlamandana said. “Writing was my only escape,” an experience that changed her understanding of strength.

“Strength is not always doing things for everyone. It is actually admitting that you are not safe.”

For her, asking for help was now part of being strong. “Strength means reaching out to people and saying ‘I can’t do this.’ Strength means putting yourself first.”

A story too personal to share

Sharing the story has not been easy. Hlamandana said her younger sister could not finish reading the manuscript because some of it was too personal.

But she wanted the book to reach people who have spent years being the dependable one as well as those who assume that person is coping simply because they have never said otherwise.

After eight months in hospital, Hlamandana is bringing a story that began in private into the public domain. “I’m healing,” she said. “And this is part of it.”
Tickets are available on computicket

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