Yes, my arm is detained in a hospital mortuary

By PASCAL MWANDAMBO

Mr David Mbandi Sanguli heaves a deep sigh and says: “I feel as if part of me is dead and lying in a hospital mortuary. I am very depressed.”

The 37-year-old casts a glance at the stump that is left of his amputated right arm, as he struggles to open a document from Wesu hospital in Wundanyi. He says, his arm has been lying at the hospital for the last five years over a more than Sh500,000 bill.

The arm was taken to the hospital by police officers for preservation pending investigation after it was severed by a machine at a sisal factory. Sanguli says this is a bad joke taken too far: “They should never have spent so much on it.”

Sanguli, a resident of Mwatunge village in Taita-Taveta County, sees himself as more sinned against than sinning, as William Shakespeare would have put it.

His tale sounds like a farce burnished in hell. He says he was a factory hand at a sisal farm in Mwatate. Working on a production line installing bristles on wooden brushes. Sanguli recalls the fateful day on July 5, 2007: “It was 3pm and I had just resumed afternoon duties at the brush-making section.”

Machine snapped

 “I had just removed several brush bundles from the machine when suddenly a lid from the machine snapped and trapped my hand as it continued rotating. The pain was excruciating. I screamed and my colleagues rushed to assist me. I was drenched in blood as my arm was severed from the elbow.”

Sanguli was rushed to the farm’s clinic for first aid then transferred to Moi Hospital in Voi. One of his colleagues informed the police in Wundanyi about the accident.

The officers collected the arm from the factory and took it to Wesu hospital for preservation pending investigation. After two months at the hospital, Sanguli was discharged and hired a lawyer to take up the matter at  Mombasa Law Courts. When police completed their investigation, they told him to go to the hospital and collect the arm.

A letter from the Wundanyi OCS Paul Odede dated April 30, 2008, asks the Wesu hospital to “allow the chopped hand to be taken by the relatives for disposal”.

However, Sanguli got a rude shock on visiting the hospital when he was given a bill of Sh106,000 as the cost of preserving the limb for a year. There was a glimmer of hope in 2009 when the High Court in Mombasa ordered the sisal farm to pay him Sh1.4 million as compensation for the accident.

Sanguli says his lawyer kept Sh900,000 and gave him Sh500,000.

He opened a small shop at Mwatunge, but after a short while, the business collapsed.

He often remembers the limb lying at the hospital and hopes that one day the bill would be waived and he will be allowed to pick it. Asking for half a million shillings for a dead limb might as well be wishful thinking.

Efforts by The Standard On Saturday to get a comment on the matter from the superintendent at Wesu were fruitless. A source at the hospital only said: “When a human part is stored at the hospital, we charge for its preservation.”