Nightmare at midnight: Did doctor abort rivals baby?

It is a mystery worthy of a Sherlock Holmes classic: An illicit affair, a miscarriage, love gone sour, a phantom Ugandan lover, a damsel in distress and lawsuits.

Someone is lying. The question is who?

On the night of June 7, last year, Irene Ager Awuor says she was driven to a city hospital after experiencing severe bleeding.

There, claims Ager, a Dr Doreen Lugaliki who was not a staffer having left the hospital in 2011, conspired with an unnamed doctor to terminate her four- month pregnancy, because she suspected Ager was having an affair with her husband, Kituku Kinyae.

But Ager denies she was having an affair with Kinyae, and says her Ugandan boyfriend, Eric Pepah, who used to work for Kinyae, used his boss’ mobile phone to communicate with her. It is these messages, she alleges, that Dr Lugaliki stumbled upon and wrongly assumed Ager was sleeping with her husband.

Nonsense, scoffs Dr Lugaliki. “This whole thing is based on a case I have filed against my estranged husband for child support. You are a journalist. Ask yourself, If this alleged ‘abortion’ occurred in June last year, why is this thing coming up now – almost nine months later?” 

According to Ager, she began chatting with her boyfriend in the morning of June 6 like is usual with lovers, till 9pm when she retired to bed. But when she started bleeding at around 11pm later that night, she texted him once more, unaware the phone was in Dr Lugaliki’s hands.

She claims the doctor, while pretending to be her boyfriend, allegedly triggered a conversation through text messages and advised her to take a taxi to hospital.

On arrival, Ager alleges that the doctor informed her - without an initial diagnosis – that the pregnancy had to be terminated to save her life. She was taken to theatre and while on the bed, Dr Lugaliki photographed her before she passed out after an injection.

“Dr Lugaliki started taking pictures of me with her phone while the male doctor stood on the side watching. I was in pain and asked them to attend to me urgently. She asking me questions before they walked out and started conversing in low tones,” recalls Ager.

“I found myself in the ward in the morning after coming back to my senses. My cousin who arrived later, told me that the pregnancy had been terminated.

“I was discharged in the morning. My cousin came and paid the bill amounting to Sh70,000. Dr Lugaliki was there. She asked me many questions; wanting to know where I live, work and about my family. She also took pictures of me with her phone again,” claims Ager.

Now Ager has written to the hospital in a letter dated February 17 demanding to know precisely what happened that night. Who was Dr Doreen Lugaliki? Why did she take pictures of her that night?

“I feel angry and disappointed. I have no idea what happened. I went to hospital that night and next thing I knew, I was in theatre. The incident left me weak. I experience continuous headaches, stomach pains, and I get contractions that make me faint. I am weak and sick all the time. This has caused me a lot of agony and depression,” she lamented during the interview.

When The Nairobian contacted the hospital’s Patient Care/Customer Services Manager, he said, “The hospital was shocked about these allegations. Because of doctor-patient confidentiality, we cannot say much. There are right channels she (Ager) can follow. She can come then we talk to her.”

Curiously, Ager says Eric Pepah, her Ugandan boyfriend, only came to the hospital the next day, not that night when she was in distress. He didn’t pay the bill, and she has never seen him since. When The Nairobian sent him a text message to confirm whether he chatted with Ager on phone that night, he did not respond. He could not be reached on the phone number provided by Ager either. Truecaller mobile application identified the number as registered in the name of Muzukawa Papah. Kinyae says on that day, Eric, who was in Nairobi, borrowed his phone because he didn’t have airtime.

“We parted at 9pm. I went home, ate and slept. I was asleep when the lady (Ager) began sending messages.  When I woke up in the morning, I realised my wife had left the house at night. That was normal because she is a doctor. She came back at 6.30am waving a photograph of a woman on her phone and demanding to know who the woman was. The more I tried to explain, the more she couldn’t listen.

“We have since parted, and she is now using the picture of that woman in court against me. When I think about this issue and other things that have happened, I get scared,” he says.

In a letter dated February 17, three days after Ager fired off her letter, Kinyae wrote to the hospital seeking to know how his wife Dr Lugaliki, who was not their member of staff, got a picture of woman admitted in one of their wards and who that woman is.

However, while Dr Lugaliki claims Ager was, indeed, having an affair with her husband, she says she was not at that hospital that night (she stopped working there in 2011) and had nothing to do with Ager’s miscarriage.

“It is actually him (Kinyae) who took her to hospital, not me. That night, he came home at about 9pm but left at 11pm saying he was going to meet a client. He didn’t come back till 2.30 am. I was awake because I was reading for an exam.

“Of course I was suspicious. Who meets clients at 11pm? I noticed he had left one of his phones at home and when I checked through his inbox, and saw messages about bleeding and stomach pains, that’s the first time I knew about Ager. I was furious. He had been having unprotected sex?

“I immediately sent those messages to my e-mail and when he came home, I confronted him. He kept quiet for ten minutes and then admitted everything, that he’d been having an affair with Ager. The next morning, he came home and showed me a photograph of  Ager sitting on a hospital bed. It is him who took that photograph and you can see from her pose that she doesn’t seem tense as would be the case if she was being photographed by a stranger (me).

“We went for counseling, even the church knows. But when it didn’t work, I walked out of the marriage. He refused to pay school fees for the children, so I sued him. The matter is in court. That is why these allegations against me have erupted. He wants to spoil my name, get me fired from my job. I know it is not Ager who is behind this drama but him,” says Dr Lugaliki. 

The Nairobian spoke to a former neighbour of the couple who said, “The two were always fighting, and had two little children. I often had to intervene when things got bad.

“The fallout last June was terrible. What I recall is that during a meeting to reconcile them, he said, ‘I don’t know what I was doing, and I’m not going to repeat it, but we can’t go on talking about it’.”

Dr Lugaliki sent to The Nairobian a scan of text messages in which Ager allegedly says sorry “for everything I have done to you and your family. I swear I did not mean to harm anyone not even the slightest bit…”