During his tenure as Prime Minister in the Grand Coalition Government, ODM leader Raila Odinga was operated on after doctors found a blood clot in his head.
Upon asking him if he had fallen or hit his head, the Premier recalled that he had banged his head rather badly on a car door.
The government was putting the draft new Constitution to the public for its endorsement. Raila and former President Mwai Kibaki had invited pro-Constitution MPs to a meeting at KICC to motivate and advise them on how to deal with propaganda around the drafted constitution.
Some months earlier, Raila had felt some pain in his head and had taken some painkillers to ease it. During the meeting, the pain in Raila’s head intensified and he began to feel very unwell indeed.
He also had another function to attend. The KICC meeting was followed by lunch but he skipped that and went on to launch the cleaning of Nairobi dam under auspices of the Universal Youth Federation, sponsored by Nairobi businessman and philanthropist Manu Chandaria. The launch ceremony involved him having to wade through mud and climb into some heavy machinery-all the while suffering intense pain.
“When I returned to the car, I gave my muddy shoes to one of my aides to clean. When he gave them back, I couldn’t get them on. The pain in my head was becoming unbearable, and I asked the driver to take me straight to the hospital,” Raila narrates in his book Flames of Freedom.
The ODM leader met Dr. Macharia and he was sent to the X-ray department where his head was scanned.
Macharia looked at the scan, he told him gravely that he had seen something that was disturbing. He wanted a second opinion. He called in Dr. David Oluoch Olunya, a respected neurosurgeon who was at the time working at Aga Khan Hospital.
As they waited for Olunya, Raila’s wife Ida Odinga called and the Premiere informed her that he was in the hospital, and when Macharia realised it was the wife on the life, he requested her to come to the hospital. Ida and Olunya arrived almost simultaneously.
The sub-cranial blood clot in Raila’s head had caused a film of fluid to accumulate between his skull and his brain, and that was the cause of the intense pain.
The doctors informed him that the minor door accident was the cause of the clot-but whatever the case, the solution was a surgical one. Raila asked to go home and organise himself, but the doctors decline.
“If they released me, anything could happen - I could fall or have an accident, and that would exacerbate the problem,” Raila recalled.
He was immediately transferred to St Georges wing, where one of Olunya’s colleagues, Dr. MM Qureshi, came to check on him. They decided to operate immediately. Ida signed her consent and he was taken to the theatre that evening.
Forty-eight hours later, he woke up on the same bed in the Intensive Care Unit, where his sister-in-law Dr. Anne Oburu had lied on two days earlier when she was ill too.
