The doctors jumped into action, plugging in needles hooked into intravenous fluids, taking blood samples to laboratories, and slotting emergency medicines into Stephen’s mouth.

But then, thirty minutes into all the action, Stephen started suffering seizures. The doctor on hand quickly worked it out: “He’s allergic to that drug,” the fellow declared, beginning the process of reversing its administration.

The allergic reaction was quickly recorded, and a caution slip placed on Stephen’s hospital file (top Kampala hospitals have these).

The next day, shortly after noon, much to the relief of Stephen’s wife, the patient was feeling far more stable even though the diagnosis had come in worrying: appendicitis. Surgery was required.

Just then, a nurse walked in with a pack of medicine and issued it.

“Hold on,” Stephen’s wife said, spotting a yellow tablet that looked uncomfortably familiar, “isn’t that the medicine he is allergic to?”

“No. The doctor said he should take this,” replied the little nurse, nonchalantly.

“Which doctor? Are you sure?” Stephen’s wife, stubborn as wives can sometimes be, went.

Ten minutes later, after a few checks with the doctor on duty and phone calls to the doctor on duty the night before, it turned out her stubbornness had saved Stephen’s life.

They went through that day normally as hospital schedules go, trying to bring Stephen up to surgery-readiness. The next morning, the doctor determined that he would be ready for surgery that afternoon at 1400hrs.

And at around noon, in walked a nurse, with medicine for that portion of the day.

Stephen’s wife was a little surprised to see a yellow tablet among the medicines on offer.

“Er…what is that?” she asked, politely.

“Medicine,” replied the nurse, probably believing Stephen’s wife to be suffering from stupidity of massive proportions.

“I think he is allergic to that medicine,” began Stephen’s wife, getting out of the attendant’s chair to go and confirm the prescription with the hospital pharmacist…who confirmed that it was indeed the forbidden medicine.

The day after surgery Stephen’s wife was fully alert at noon to intercept the nurse bearing the handful of tablets that included, as expected by now, the forbidden, seizure-inducing yellow tablets.

On the fifth day of their hospitalization, Stephen’s wife had worked out that it was easier to simply accept the tablets, pick out the offensive yellow ones, and throw them away.

On the tenth day, they were discharged with all the relevant papers and a pack of tablets. Including the yellow ones in a packet indicating the necessity for a double dose.

Wondering how this was even remotely possible after ten days of mentioning it to a string of nurses on rotation, Stephen’s wife stormed the central office to have some hot words with somebody in charge.

“What?”

“Why do you people keep giving my husband medicine that he is allergic to? He almost died on the first day he got here because of that medicine. How can you continue to make the same mistake day in, day out?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said the person in charge, turning to patient files, “What’s the patient’s name again?”

Duly told, he selected the file, and opened it.

And found, carefully filed on top of a stack of white sheets of case notes and prescriptions, a blue sheet of paper.

With the words, “Highly allergic to ‘yellow medicine’. Do not prescribe.”

My Friend has known of her inefficiency from the day she submitted her job application, giving one a hint of how weak his mind is. Concrete proof that my Friend’s brain has been adversely affected by the dust of Kampala is the fact that he has kept Ellen in employment for a year and a half now, in spite of incidents such as the below.

His excuse, though, is that he only needs Ellen to run basic ‘one+plus+one=equals two” errands, and nothing more.

“I can’t even issue her with more than one instruction at a time,” he says, “but that’s okay, because I have a system.”

To illustrate his point, he recounted the story of the week – and yet a typical, everyday occurrence for him:

Having sent Ellen out to run some errands, Friend went on his routine client visits, hoping to collect payments where possible and tout for new business. A couple of hours into the day, Friend had collected a couple of cheques and needed to find Ellen so she could go and do the banking.

Thanking God for the expediency of mobile telephones, he rang her up.

“Ellen,” he said, speaking slowly and deliberately as he has learnt to do when dealing with her over the phone, “Where. Are. You? I. Need. To. Give. You. Something. Now. So. I. Need. To. Find. You. Where. You. Are. So: Where. Are. You?”

(Obviously, reader, this approach costs one more in airtime, but Friend is resigned to this business cost.)

On the other end of the phone, Ellen gave the question some quick consideration, perhaps looked around her environs, and replied with an accuracy level that must have drawn a flush of self-pride within herself at having come up with such a correct answer:

“I am in town.”

Friend, over the last year and a half, had expected this and was not at all as flustered as I would have been by now were I at his end of the phone.

“Okay. [insert short pause] Now, I. Need. To. Find. You. And. Give. You. Something. Now. [insert short pause here as well]. Where. In. Town. Are. You?”

Ellen, no doubt looking around her to confirm her location as precisely as possible, responded with:

“I am at the Shell.”

Friend hung up.

Not that he was giving up on her, he explained to me.

“At this point, I normally have to hang up so she can take a few minutes to think about what is going on. I think she probably thinks there is a network problem or my battery is low. And I make sure I don’t wait too long otherwise she might totally forget the conversation, so I called back after about a minute.”

“Ellen. I. Need. To. Find. You. At. Which. Shell. Are. You?”

To which Ellen replied, demonstrating that she had indeed used the one-minute pause to think hard about what was going on and find her bearings: “Actually, it’s not a Shell. It’s a Caltex.”

Friend hung up again.

This time, I figured (he didn’t tell me, I just worked it out) it was Friend who used the one-minute interlude of silence to do some thinking and came up with the sentence he should have used right at the start:

“Ellen, go to Crane Bank and wait for me there.”

I’m not talking about my maid – that one and all her previous cousins and sisters have always been lower down the cerebral ladder. Yesterday evening, for example, in spite of my having told her in three languages (English, Luganda and Runyankore) that I wanted her to buy six sticks of roast pork from Bamboo, she still managed to hear “Spend about one hour looking for a place that will sell you a kilo of raw but relatively old pork at exactly Ushs6,000.” What impresses me is the way she accomplishes such tasks – I know, for instance, that if the closest chap selling raw but relatively old pork had been eighteen miles away but only offered a kilo at Ushs5,700, she would have walked back empty-handed.

Irritating, of course, but one can go without pork on the occasional evening, or even send the wretched wench back out on the errand again in the hope that she will get it right eventually.

Not so with my damn mechanic!

The mo-fo (moronic fool) took my car Friday evening promising to have it back by Saturday, three o’clock without the odd sound from the left hand side of the engine.

I like the fact that the fellow has a university degree. I am also impressed by his always turning up in a clean-ish white lab coat, his use of english, and the email address on his business card. But I wasn’t going to get carried away and expect to be driving out of town at three o’clock as he said, so I planned for five o’clock – a buffer of two whole hours.

At eight o’clock, he finally called me to say, “Boss, let’s try for tomorrow instead.”

‘Try’?

“Why? Why isn’t the car ready? You said it was something simple to do with the air cleaner.”

“Yes, but when we started work we noticed there was another sound. Now we have opened the engine and…”

“You’ve done what?”

I am no mechanic and whereas I admire people like my old man who pop open the bonnet of any vehicle and slot their fingers within engines unafraid of getting them chopped off, I am not there yet. I open the bonnet and then look around for as long as it takes for my wife to believe I am knowledgeable about these things.

But I do know that opening up an engine is a big step in the life of a car. Like surgery.

Yeah - not in Wandegeya

“We opened the engine to see…”

“To see what?” This was like hearing the doctor saying, “We cut your (insert close relation here) open to find out why (s)he was complaining of a stomachache.”

“Anti, boss…” he started, and I stopped listening as he went into the details of what the surgery had discovered.

As he droned on in Wandegeya mechanic mode, I just knew I was next going to see this car after paying the ransom on around Wednesday, and just as I was beginning to guess what the cost would probably be, he ended his debrief with, “….a deposit of two million shillings. Can I come for it now?”