Thread by @tmsruge

2) I got the frantic call Thursday afternoon. 4pm. I was finishing an online application for @UIA to register as an investor (whole other mess of a thread) 
“Teddy! We’ve had an accident! Our people are badly off. Some of them are broken!”

3) My COO was frantic. I was 25 miles away in Masindi town and needed to make it back to the fields. We kicked up a 25-mile trail of dust along Masindi-Hoima Road, laying down a permanent wail of the horn to clear the road.

4/ Our field vehicle lost control and flipped over on the side of road. We reached the accident site to find it cleared. The vehicle wedged into a drainage ditch. A lone police surveying the scene quickly flagged us in the right direction.

5/ We screeched to a halt at the entrance to the clinic at Kikingura trading center, dramatically enveloping bystanders in a cloud of dust. I bust through & let the trail of blood lead me past the the small counter & half empty shelves.

6/ Pained screams welcomed us even before we got to the back room. Two girls were writhing in pain on the floor. I reached one of them & asked how she was doing. “I don’t know you” she replied, clearly in shock. I suspected a concussion.

7/ My eyes scanned the room to see only 2 makeshift beds & a bench. A nurse held a young man’s foot in the air. His toes mangled as he lay screaming in a pool of blood. He was being held down as she tried to stem the bleeding.

8/ The room was a collection of missing fingers & open wounds down to the bone. I reached an employee, new to the team by a few months, sitting silently looking at the remains of his right hand. 4 fingers were missing & he seemed confused.

9/ “How are you?” I engaged. “I am somehow,” he replied, a tear rolling down his face. He was waiting patiently to be helped. Another male nurse was calmly applying iodine & cotton to open wounds to stem the bleeding.

10/ The air was thick with iodine & disinfectant. “What can I do?” I asked the nurse. “Get some gloves, carry this one to the car.” Gloved, I picked up the concussed employee to the car. There were others, silently waiting in shock.

11/ Another employee was on the phone calling and waving down any available vehicle to transport the wounded to Masindi Hospital. I called my brother in Masindi to go to the hospital to prep the doctors that we were on our way.

12/ Out of vehicles, I hopped on a boda boda to follow the caravan to the hospital. By the time I’d reached half the team was already connected to drip. Our group quickly filled the 18 beds on one wing of the men’s ward at Masindi Hospital.

13/ We had exchanged iodine and nostril-clearing scent of disinfectant at Kikingura for the pungent cocktail of urine, fecal matter, and what smelled like actual death. Masindi hospital was the only place with enough beds for all of us.

14/ It took almost 3 hours to assess everyone. There was only 1 doctor & 2 nurses borrowed from another ward. The place was now milling frantically as parents & loved ones streamed in, panicked. The news was out.

14/ It took almost 3 hours to assess everyone. There was only 1 doctor & 2 nurses borrowed from another ward. The place was now milling frantically as parents & loved ones streamed in, panicked. The news was out.

15/ Godfrey, hooked up to an IV was breathing steadily but his body was twitching. He started to choke on a clear fluid. “Doctor!” He took a glance from his patient to my direction. “Turn him on his side!”

16/ I gently rolled him over until Doctor could come as the fluid drained from the side of his mouth. He shined a light into his eyes. Godfrey was unconscious. His right hand was twitching uncontrollably.

17/ “Doctor, what’s that?” I knew nothing about medical conditions, not even from the few episodes of medical dramas I’d catch on TV.
“Damage to the left side of the brain.” My heart sank. Anything internal was going to be bad. Very bad.

18/ He needed a CT scan but there was nowhere to get that done in Masindi. I sent a team to the other private clinics in town to see if any were open with CT Scans. Negative. He needed to get to Kampala, but it was already 8pm.

19/ “We have an ambulance, but you need to fuel it. It’s around 400k (UGX).” I remembered the sign on the door saying “…all government services are free at this facility.” But Godfrey needs urgent care. The moral soap box has to wait.

20/ Godfrey’s wife has arrived by now and she’s firmly holding his hand, keeping it from twitching. His eyes are half-closed. The Doctor, a late 30s gent with nerdish spectacles injects him with something. “To keep the swelling down,” he says.

21/ My internal clock starts ticking louder. Godfrey has hours left if he doesn’t get help soon. I recruit my little brother and one of our field inspectors volunteers to accompany Godfrey and his wife to Kampala after we fuel the vehicle.

22/ My brother is a student at Kyambogo University. Whenever he falls ill, I do my best to send him to what I consider a decent private hospital, The Surgery in Naguru. I trusted that he’d guide the driver there without too much delay.

23/ As they set off, I started my internal clock to check in with them around 2am. I went back to helping the nurses administer pain killers and IVs, and help calm family members worst fears about their loved ones.

24/ My COO, Pamela finally arrived and immediately collapsed in my arms in a heap of tears. This hit her hard and she was doing her best to just keep it together. My sister and I have weathered every up and down of starting @rt_farms.

25/ It never occurred to us to plan for this. How does one prepare for this? We had a first aid kit at the office for treating bruises, cuts, and a pack of sanitary pads. But a ward full of maimed employees? What else hadn’t we planned for?

26/ The nurses were exhausted, and the ward was still buzzing with family members praying, breathing sighs of relief. I looked around at other patients: some were on beds, others on tattered form mattresses on the floor.

27/ One patient’s feet stuck out from the bedsheet that covered him from ankle to neck. He hadn’t moved but was breathing slowly. I got worried someone would trip on his feet. I kept gently walking around him.

28/ In my grandfather’s dying days, he hated us for bringing him to this ward. He’d spent 40yrs as a Dr.’s assistant here & wanted to die peacefully at home, but we stubbornly didn’t listen. I now understood why he didn’t want to die here.

29/ Around 1am, fatigue set in & I still needed to hear from Godfrey in Kampala. A support team of managers was in place for night duty, I walked to my sister’s place, just outside the hospital gate. A block from my old elementary school.

30/ The first message came in at 1:45am. Godfrey was bounced at The Surgery. There was no staff to administer a CT Scan or to tend to him.

31/ This was the second thing I hadn’t planned for: the crap shoot that is overnight emergency medical services in Kampala, or the country for that matter. I’ve grimaced at politicians flying to Nairobi and EU for emergency care. This was why.

32/ The ambulance spent the next 4 hrs bouncing from hospital to hospital: Platinum: no scanner, Mulago, no one until morning. Over & again, no one available. Finally, Mengo Hospital had someone to scan. It’s 4am. They wanted 240k.

33/ We had 400k on mobile money. The third thing I hadn’t planned on: cash prepayment for medical services. My phone blacked out around 5am and had to hunt around for a USB cord. It took 20 minutes to restart. Then came the heart breaker.

34/ They did CT Scan, but no doctor there to interpret. Frustrating the matter even worse, Mengo wanted 500k UPFRONT before admitting Godfrey. We had 160k. “Please admit him,” his wife begs them. “We’ll pay the balance before 8am.”

35/ They pack up Godfrey with the scans and head to Mulago with the scans and crossed fingers a doctor there would help. It’s almost 7 now. Godfrey’s breathing is slowing. Mulago is taking too long. He won’t make it.

36/ I try to send mobile money from my Barclays mobile account, but I am so exhausted I can’t make out the convoluted menus. Am wondering if a mobile money agent is available now. I can go and withdrawal money from the ATM and send.

37/ I instruct my brother to head back to Mulago while I sort out the money issue. By this time, the ambulance had unloaded them at Mulago and was on it’s way to Masindi.

38/By the time my brother finds another method of transport to take them back to Mengo it’s just after 8 and they have to navigate morning traffic. Meanwhile I’ve sorted a way to send him all the money he needs.

39/ The money arrives on his phone as he reaches the gate to Mengo Hospital. I call him to confirm. “Yes, I have received the money.” His voices goes solemn.

“But it’s as if he’s dead. He’s not breathing.”

40/ I had just reached the inner gates at Masindi Hospital. I went numb and froze. A wave of sadness crept from my abdomen up to my eyes as they welled up. I lowered the phone & put my hands on my knees to contain the sadness.

41/ I straightened up, realizing I couldn’t break down in full view of my coworkers, to see my mom heading my way. And that did it.

42/ If there’s anyone I can’t hide from, it’s my mother. Our eyes met and I nodded. She knew and raced over. The minute she touched my arm, it all released. Right there in front of everyone. I was defeated. And enraged.

43/ She had been at the hospital the whole night, because my youngest brother was among the injured. I’d given him a job as a way to motivate him to go back to school. Either focus in school or you will manual labor your way through life.

44/ I nearly lost him too. And this added to the weight of the grief.

45/ Godfrey Ikobua took his last breath shortly after 9am, on Friday 11 January, 2019 at the gates of Mengo Hospital. He was 29. A hard-working young man we worked with, ate with, played with, and laughed with.

46/ Someone saw fit to trade his life for personal gain & denied him the rest of his life. I don’t know if his injury was survivable or not. All I know is the medical system we are supposed to rely on failed him the chance to fight through.

47/ He was buried in his home village in Arua on Saturday, surrounded by family & a representative from @rt_farms. We paid for all funeral expenses. It didn’t replace their son, but we made sure his death didn’t financially burden them.

48/ The last of our employees were released today. Only one, with severely body abrasions was held for a few more days. The mass discharge was mostly to free up space for other urgent in-coming patients. The men’s ward only had 30 beds.

49/ I had come in one morning to check on my team and noticed the gentled on the floor was now covered head to toe. He had died the night before. A victim of mob justice, who broke his spine in a beating.

For stealing a chicken.

50/ Police rescued him & dumped him on the floor, until he died. No one knew him. And no one who knew him knew he was dead. Here on the floor, a sea of humanity stepping over his feet. His body wasn’t removed until the next morning.

51/ Something in our humanity is broken fam. And we need to fix it. So long as we undervalue our own lives like this, we will always be tradable commodities to everyone else. Stepped over by those with better means.

52/ When those we entrusted with our lives feel empowered to charge for every document, to ransom treatment for the most desperate for personal enrichment, to abandon us, written off as not worth the effort. Then we’re no longer a people.

53/ This all sits heavy on me. When you start something and it takes off, you sometimes put on the blinders of excitement that shield you from the world in which you’re working in.

54/ Sometimes, however shiny revolutionary your idea may be, if you don’t take time to look around, you will eventually be reminded that it’s just a jewel on on a pile of stinky shit. The systems within which we work matter.

55/ We lost a team member this week. We lost a brother. We lost a son. We lost a friend. We needlessly lost a tax payer. Truth is, we didn’t need to. He had value.

56/ Ugandans. Let’s change this. We deserve better.

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