before the patient got out of the car, I had dashed across the open yard outside the Accident and Emergency unit straight to what looked like a triage. Behind a half-open curtain, a nurse was taking vitals for a woman who was groaning loudly. Between pants of panic and impatience, I blurted out my plea: I had a seriously ill and violent patient in the car. Could I please get someone to help me bring him in urgently?

She did not even look at me. I thought she had not heard me so I repeated my request, this time louder but with a conscious effort to sound calm, just in case she had imagined I had strayed from the mental ward. Again, she kept quiet!

I was about to go when she casually directed me to fetch a stretcher and wheel my patient in. I was sure I had not heard her right so I sought her clarification. Mu question only succeeded in annoying her. In an irate tone she duly reminded me there were many more patients in need of attention, some who were worse off than my relative.

I moved on. By observing what others arriving with new patients were doing, I ended up at the stretchers area. There were a few remaining and certainly, they were not the cornerstone that the builder rejected. Some were missing wheels; others looked like they had survived a bomb blast considering their twisted and sorry state of disrepair.

They were also plainly dirty. In fact, a number of them had raw blood in various stages of congealment apparently from previous patients.

I had heard good stories about KNH’s supposed improvement. There must be a mistake somewhere, I thought. These could not possibly be scenes from the foremost referral hospital in the country!

So I went back, this time to the reception. I found two friendly nurses and after explaining my predicament, in what sounded like well-intentioned advice, one of them told me to pick a provided-for bucket of water and clean the stretcher.

Luckily, we found a better stretcher apparently abandoned by another patient and joined the queue for the triage. As we waited, I began to appreciate that, indeed, there were worse off cases at KNH.

The radiologist had warned us that we would probably have to brave though a long wait before we were attended to, but he had also vouched for KNH as the best placed to unravel my relative’s strange illness.

Other hospitals, he warned, would bleed us dry in trial-and-error tests. Being financially hard-pressed, this advice was particularly welcome.

It was now a few minutes to midnight. Behind us was an accident victim who had been referred from Narok county hospital. Blood was still seeping out of his heavily bandaged head. His right hand and left leg also had heavy bandage. He was semi-conscious.

I would later learn from his younger brother that the victim was driving his Form One son back to school in Bomet when the car rolled several times. His son died on the spot! Behind them was a girl of around 13 or 14 years lying motionless on the stretcher. She had fallen off the balcony on the third floor and had not uttered a word ten hours later.

Immediately in front of us, a man in his early twenties had been involved in a motorcycle accident. His nose and mouth had been grazed off in the crash, and his sister told me he had suffered multiple fractures on the legs too.

A male nurse had helped to literally tether my patient to the stretcher, giving us some much-needed respite. Around 1:00am, we were done with the triage. We then joined a crowded waiting bay for a chance to see a doctor.

At one of the corners, a male patient lay in his briefs, his both legs and hands in casts and virtually his entire head a swathe of bandages. A catheter connected to a dirty bottle tied to the leg of the stretcher and his delirious but funny anecdotes suggested his injuries went beyond the physical.

His name must have been Omondi because he kept on shouting “Mimi Omondi esquire ati niko Kenyatta peke yangu (I, Omondi esquire, I’m all alone at Kenyatta…) Then in vulgar expletives, he would curse his wife for abandoning him and their children for a richer man and for allegedly planning the attack that left him for dead.

Akinyi, who must have been their teenage daughter, was now pregnant and out of school because ‘the mother was out there getting excited about having her beauty praised by an ugly man!”

At 3am, we were called in. The doctor’s ‘room’ was just a jaded bench behind old and dirty curtains. The young doctor asked for the history of the patient’s disease and furiously jotted down notes.

I noticed huge spots of fresh blood on the floor. My face must have betrayed my squeamishness because a nurse standing beside the doctor quickly cut out some tissue paper and dropped it over the largest blood smudge!

And we are building a 27 billion referral hospital instead of perfecting on what we have to help save life. But people dying is a non-issue. People must make billions by making up opportunities to Tender

@kaiganjio glad u made it

Seems it hasnt changed since 2005 when I reported in with my own sis at 12am. The most traumatising 3hrs of waiting....then off to the mogue.