Hamzah Nsereko on hospital bed. PHOTO/FILE/COURTESY
Bad things tend to randomly happen to us humans. Children get leukaemia, women die during childbirth, men lose limbs fighting off home intruders in the dark and road accidents wreak havoc.
In most of these cases, no amount of precaution will save us. No warning. Like animals on a farm, we are picked out by the top brass in hell and branded with a hot iron, castrated, or delivered to the butcher through no fault or consent of our own. Such is the capriciousness of life in our torturous fallen world.
You arrive home one evening and decide that you need a break from it all. You have been working for months on end. Your body is sore and your mind is foggy. If you go one more day without taking a break, you will break down. The monotony of city life is an anathema to you. You need to run off to some faraway outpost and leave your tedious responsibilities behind for a while. And as you cradle your head in your palms, looking at your dusty feet, you remember that your brother lives in Kasese. ‘Kasese would be perfect’, you gasp. And off you go to the bus park that soon after.
This is roughly how Hamzah Kawuma Afriqana Nsereko ended up in Kasese on June 10, 2022. After two very hectic weeks, he’d left his busy office as FUFA’s communications officer to catch a break at his brother’s place in Hima, Kasese. On arrival, Nsereko entered the gates of La Farge (Hima Cement) where his brother, Kasim Bukenya works. The two met at the staff restaurant and had refreshments before heading to the house.
His brother had discovered a nice pilau recipe that he needed to show off so they went shopping for rice and other groceries to make it happen. They had dinner, dropped the unwashed utensils in the sink (all men do this) and set off to paint Kasese town red as it was Friday night.
“We jumped into his car and went to Kasese Town. He drove me around the town, showing me all the interesting places for some time, and then we went to a certain place, one of the best places and enjoyed coffee as we do not take booze. We had coffee as usual and some snacks and water. Then at around 3 am, he asked me if we could leave to go home.
I told him, ‘My man, it’s still early. Plus I do not want to go home and sleep at this time and then have to wake up shortly after to pray subuh, the early morning prayer’. I told him, ‘Let us stay until 6am, we go pray and then sleep in peace’,” he says.
On the way back home in the pre-dawn darkness, a pedestrian appeared out of nowhere and entered the road. He must have been drunk or out of his mind somehow. He was too close to the car so breaking was pointless. Bukenya swerved and lost control of the car. Everything was happening too fast. What made it worse is that the roads in Kasese were under construction at the time. He hit one of those concrete barricades they often use during road construction, causing the car to fly off the road into a ditch.
The passenger side where Nsereko was seated was smashed beyond repair. But he did not know this yet, neither did he feel any pain. At all. Thank God he was fine, or so he thought. He turned and looked at his brother. To his surprise, his brother seemed lost.
“I tapped on him and said, ‘man, do you know what’s going on?’ He couldn’t recall anything. He didn’t know we had just been involved in an accident. Then he asked me, ‘What’s going on’? I told him we just got an accident. But he couldn’t understand anything,” Nsereko says.
Painless injury
Nsereko soon found out that his right arm was broken. But he still felt no pain. People started coming around to rescue them. They tried getting the two brothers out of the wreckage, but the car was too smashed. The door on the passenger side got stuck after hitting the barricades. But the one on the driver’s side could still open. The rescuers opened and removed his brother from the driver’s seat. Bukenya still had no idea what was going on. He was dazed out of his mind but physically unharmed.
After getting Bukenya out, the rescuers got back to Nsereko. As they tried this and that trick, Nsereko realised he couldn’t move.
“I started my supplications, thinking that anytime I may be gone. I repented and prayed all the big prayers. Anything was possible in that moment,” he says.
As they pulled him out, all the pain suddenly flooded his entire body. Almost every part of his body was in pain. When they got him out, he couldn’t sit up so they laid him in the dusty road without much care about his comfort.
He could hear then talking amongst themselves on how to get them to hospital. After 30 or 40 minutes, a Link Bus stopped and its operators volunteered to drop off the two men at the hospital. But the rescuers failed to find a way of getting them into the bus because of the injuries. After 40 minutes to an hour, almost two hours after the accident, the police came with their multipurpose pick-up truck.
“The way they carried us in was really disrespectful. They carried me by my belt and dropped me under the back seats like a dead body. And this when the real pain started. I mean, even the smallest of the stone, I could feel it. Remember the road was under construction. That’s when I started screaming,” he says.
First aid
At the hospital, they gave him anesthetics and immediately wheeled him to the theatre.
Hamzah Nsereko on hospital bed. PHOTO/FILE/COURTESY
On top of the broken arm, he had several fractures in one of his thigh bones, his pelvic bone was cracked around the groin, and the ankles on his left leg were fractured, among other injuries.
“The whole night they worked on me. I came back to my sense the next day, I think it was like 4 pm having spent over 30 hours in induced coma. Then waking up, man, I realised how cheap the hospital was. It was a typical village set up.”
Transfer to Kampala
The brothers both knew staying in this hospital was not an option. In any case, Nsereko had medical insurance that couldn’t be accessed from Kasese. This was Sunday evening. On Monday morning, Nsereko was strapped into an ambulance gurney and driven to Kampala.
As the ambulance set off, the boys’ father, Hajj Kawuma Mutumba. was rushing to the park to catch a bus. He had only heard about the accident a few hours earlier as the boys had kept it under wraps for too long. He was suspicious. When he was told not to board as his son would soon be in Kampala, he was incredulous. He thought they were not telling him the full story.
But later that day, the ambulance arrived at St Catherine Hospital on Buganda Road. The boys’ father was among the many that received Nsereko into the hospital.
“It felt good to find friends, workmates and family waiting for me. But I was in so much pain because of the long journey on bad roads. The painkillers they had given me had not worked at all.
“Even the ones they gave me on arrival were useless. They could hit me with one, nothing. The second one, nothing. The third one, they put me on morphine. Morphine is something else. As soon as it got to my brain, I got so high and started talking rubbish. When I slept soon after, I got nightmares, man. I saw someone cutting off my leg. I saw the man we had hit coming for me, it was crazy.”
Low blood levels
An average adult has nine pints of blood coursing in his veins. Tests showed that Nsereko had only four remaining. For the next 24 hours, the only treatment he received was blood transfusions. Forty-eight hours after transfusion, the operations began.
Hamzah Nsereko with his friends at the beach. PHOTO/COURTESY
The first operation would be to redo the thigh operation and replace the outdated implant he had received in Kasese with the right one. Ten hours of hammering and chiseling and grinding and smells of ground bone and disinfectants, the operation ended.
Three days after that, the surgery on the pelvis began. It also involved inserting an implant to help with the healing. Three days after that, Nsereko went back to the theatre for a surgery on his arm after which the ankles were also operated on.
In total, Nsereko stayed in the hopstal bed for one and a half months, never leaving the gurney or even turning left or right to the point of shading thick pieces of dead skin like the scales of a snake.
“All this time, there was a catheter in penis. At some point, I could no longer feel my thing. And it had become so small I was worried that I would never regain it.
“The day I turned in my bed, I was like a child who had made their first step. Celebrations in the hospital,” he laughs.
Leaving hospital
When he was discharged, he still could neither stand nor sit. He moved to his parents’ home in Mpigi District. His brother who had looked after him all this time, resumed work in Kasese and left him under the care of their 63-year-old father, Hadj Kauma Mutumba.
“My father was there for me. He carried me on his back to the bathroom, he bathed me everyday, he dressed me up in diapers. Nothing hurt me like wearing a diaper. Nothing. I never cried because of the pain from the injuries but I cried over those diapers. I realised I was helpless,” he reminisces.
Sitting
It took him three months to be able to sit for a few seconds because of the injury on the pelvis.
“After a while, I started sitting. Then I started yearning to get out of bed and surprise my family. I waited for them get absent-minded in the sitting room. Slowly, I got off my bed. I started crawling. I wanted to surprise them. I crawled slowly till I got where they were. When they saw me, they screamed in joy,” he says.
Standing
Five months after the accident, Nsereko stood up for the first time and started supporting himself slowly. Then he started going for physiotherapy. The entire body, the skin, the muscles, the bones, everything was down and needed retraining. Even these parts which weren’t fractured. The doctor gave him crutches.
Back to work
Eight months after the accident, in February 2023, he was able to get back to work. He did not have to, but he was bored of staying home every day. By this time he could drive and sit for a considerable amount of time before the pain kicked in. He still walked on crutches but he got rid of one, a month later.
Two months ago, two years after the accident, Nsereko got rid of the second crutch. Although he still has a little limp, he is at 90 percent recovery.
Fresh perspective
“The time I spent bedridden made me realise that I had friends. I received many visitors every day that there came a moment when the doctor advised people to stop coming. FUFA workmates, family members, sports journalists, it was too much. People showered me with love. They kept bringing money. Until I found myself with Shs8m.
Hamzah Nsereko shows off his stamina as he recovers from a motor accident. PHOTO/JOHN BATANUDDE
“I also came to realise that life is so precious. We often take it for granted when we are able to wake up and move freely. But after spending entire days bedridden, I understood the value of life. I then started practising meditation to reflect on daily life and to distinguish those who genuinely care and those who are just acquaintances. Duniya etumaliramu bwerere,” he says.
