MY STORY: I lost my arm in a car accident - but I still live a full life

When the van that 31-year-old Dorcus Kero was travelling in veered off the Nairobi-Mombasa highway three years ago, she thought she was going to die. She was travelling with two of her colleagues. When it began rolling, she was flung out through the window and the van rolled towards her, landing on her left arm.

“It was all so surreal. When everything stopped moving, I tried to move but I couldn’t. That was when I looked down at my arm and saw it was barely there. It had been crushed into little pieces of bone and flesh. It felt numb,” she recalls.

It was supposed to be a good day. After years of job hunting she had finally landed a job at a paint manufacturing factory just two months prior. On this fateful evening, they were finished making the day’s deliveries and were headed back to the office. Then it all came apart.

“Our driver ran away after the accident and my other colleague, a woman, though unhurt was too shaken to call for help,” she says.

Thinking that she was dying, her first instinct was to call her mother so that she would hear the news from her and not a third party. Her colleague made the call for her and she spoke to her mother.

“The next four hours were a haze. I lost a lot of blood and was slipping in and out of consciousness. I remember being taken to the Coast General Hospital then being transferred to a private hospital where I was immediately booked for surgery,” she recalls.

A BIG CHANGE

She woke up the next day with her left arm cut off above the elbow. She didn’t know what to feel. She was frightened about what lay ahead of her, and angry that this had happened to her, but also grateful that she was still alive. Her five-day stay in the hospital was punctuated with bouts of joyfulness alongside those of weeping. Her hospital room was flooded with friends and relatives, some of them empathising with her and others just curious to see what a woman with one hand looks like.

“The most difficult thing about being back home in Kilifi was having to have everything done for me. I had moved from being a vibrant 26-year-old to being fully dependent. While nobody complained about taking care of me, I felt bad that they had to. Sometimes, I wore the same clothes for two days to reduce the wash load,” she says.

One day, about four months into her recovery, she saw a feature on the television about a young woman who was born without both hands and who does everything including cooking and bathing her baby with her feet. This was like a call to action for Dorcus.

“I waited until everyone was out of the house and tried washing some clothes. It was a challenge but I did it. The next day, I attempted to cook ugali. Again, I was successful. My mother, though, was worried that I might have gotten burnt in the process,” she recalls.

After cooking a sufuria of ugali with her one good arm, Dorcus knew that there wasn’t anything that she couldn’t do. Every day, she tried doing different house chores.

The next challenge was coming out to people around her with her new look. She had taken to wearing big jerseys or shawls to hide her stump.

“Knowing that this is how my arm is always going to look, I decided to face my reality. I just woke up one morning, wore a short sleeved shirt and went out into the neighbourhood. People asked questions for a few weeks then they got used to me.”

FINDING HERSELF AGAIN

A year after her accident, she had recovered well and could do most things for herself. The big problem now was that she had no job. Her employer had fired her as soon as the accident happened. Now financially dependent on her family, she took up an internship at the National Council for Persons with Disabilities in Mombasa to ward off the creeping feelings of depression.

“I found my happiness in 2016 when a friend suggested to me a football match that was to be held for breast cancer awareness. I had never played football before but I accepted and I did my best on the field that day.”

Someone noticed her out in the field and she was granted a lifetime membership in The Soccer Divas Club, a football club in Mombasa. Football is now her new found passion. This is where she spends most of her time training with her newfound friends.

When she is not playing football, she goes to the Mount Kenya University where she is studying Community Development. She hopes that at the end, she will get an even better job than the one she had.

“I am so busy these days there is no time for stress. I have also taken up biking. We do this as a group every second Sunday of the month. I stared death in the eye and I was given a second chance to live so I am living my life to the fullest.”