'IT'S MY TIME TO GO'

In this exclusive interview Carol de Swardt tells us why, after years of agony, she will soon be going assisted-suicide to an clinic where doctors will help her to die

- PIETER VANZYL

THE woman in the photos taken years ago exudes energy and a love of life. It's clear Carol de Swardt was at her happiest in shorts and a T-shirt, soaking up the sun and having fun in the great outdoors.

In one picture she's in the back of a bakkie holding a fishing rod. In another she stands near the ocean, a beer in her hand.

"That woman is still here inside me. That's what makes it so bad, Carol says.

The life she used to love is a thing of the past. Since having her right leg amputated, she's been confined to a wheelchair and seldom goes to the beach. In fact, she's in so much pain she hardly goes anywhere. "I'm a living corpse," she tells us. "My left leg is wasting away and has open sores."

This no way to live, she says - and it's for this reason doctors at the Pegasos Clinic in Switzerland have agreed to help her to die. Everything is arranged and a date has been set: 31 January 2024 is the day her assisted suicide will take place.

Carol has no doubts or regrets, she says in an exclusive interview at her home in George in the Western Cape. "I don't want people to feel sorry for me."

There's definitely nothing pitiful about the 63-year-old. For eight years she fought a courageous legal battle and was ultimately successful in her bid to persuade the high court in Pietermaritzburg that she'd lost her leg due to medical negligence.

In 2020 the court found that after being diagnosed with squamous carcinoma, a common skin cancer, on both legs Carol was given excessive doses of radiation at Grey's Hospital in Maritzburg.

This resulted in "irreversible damage to her lower limbs", the court heard.

Her joints were so badly damaged one leg eventually had to be amputated.