“I had to close people’s abdomen’s under torchlight..or had to let three babies die in one afternoon because I didn’t have what I needed to save them.” That was the last post Dr Lydia Wahura Kanyoro wrote on her Facebook page just days before she committed suicide.
Dr Wahura was found dead at the Kenyatta Hospital Parking lot – inside her car. She died on Tuesday, June 15, after injecting herself with anesthesia taking her own life.
A post she made on Facebook in 2020 read: “Work is killing me.”
From the post, one can tell that Dr Wahura’s work had taken a toll on her life. The 35-year-old may have been depressed by the difficult working environment – plus a rigorous academic work as she was studying for her post-graduate at Nairobi’s medical school at KNH.
Dr Wahura was actively highlighting the dangers that medics faced at work, especially their exposure to Covid-19 virus.
Kenyatta National Hospital declined to comment on the matter saying it was a subject of police investigations.
Anaesthetic-inducing drugs and syringes were found inside her car.
Police also found a printed note said to be a suicide writing.
She noted that she was uncomfortable in her own skin and said she was “scared of dying but more scared of living”. Detectives declined to reveal the full text printed on the morning of her death.
Dr Wahura had complained that the government had neglected doctors and that the health system had become dysfunctional.
“…when a system is bad, it is even worse. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put into words how much losing patients I knew never needed to die messed with my mental health,” she had posted in December.
She said that at one point she left a well-paying government job for a private one in Nairobi that paid less “because it was slowly killing me to work as a precursor to the morgue instead of [working] as a doctor”.“My mum asked me why I was leaving [the well-paying government job] and the words that came out of my mouth were that I felt like a witch doctor,” she said.
She made noise about the death of Dr Stephen Mogusu, the 28-year-old doctor who died of Covid-19 in 2020. Mogusu had warned the doctors to save their own lives first.
“I didn’t know Dr Mogusu personally, but his death feels more obscene than other obscene deaths. He worked for months giving care that he couldn’t get. Worked for months without remuneration. No medical cover,” she had posted.
“In the days before his death, we were contributing to his hospital bill and a few hours before he died, we were looking for a convalescent plasma for him. Young guy… it’s obscene…Arrgh.”
Police are still investing the events that lead to Lydia’s death. Meanwhile, many doctors continue to silently struggle with mental health.