“Don’t leave me please, don’t leave me like my father did…” were the only word she could bring herself to whisper as she sat , with fear, in the corridor opposite the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) where Junior was being operated on. She could still see his bloody body lying lifeless on the stretcher as he was rushed into the ICU unit of St Bartholomew hospital and then she thought of giving anything in the world just to trade places with him, her sweet junior.
Only a year ago, she was a youngling born into the Nigerian society, having just gotten her NCE from Nassaraw State College of Education, She was ready for Job hunting. She has had plans of attending the University of Nigeria Nssuka, but was unable to make the minimum score required in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) and so settled for Federal Polytechnic Nekede in Imo state, where she was still denied admission because she didn’t meet the minimum score required. She knew she was smart, maybe not the kind of smart that the universities and polytechnics wanted, but smart for the College of Education with hope of trying for the University the next year. Maybe she would learn a thing or two from the College of Education that could better her performance in the UME next year, she thought to herself. The year sailed swiftly and was gone before it could even had a chance to announce its presence and with it went her dream of gettinfg a university education. Her scores did improve but not enough to get her into The University of Nigeria, and so she gave up and went on to complete her education at Nassaraw State College of Education where she met Bode , the love of her life.
It had only been three hours since Junior was rushed into the ICU , but it seemed to Amanda like a lifetime, to her time had all of a sudden assumed the speed of a sloth. Her hand bag was vibrating, it was her phone but she hadn’t noticed-. How could she? Her whole world hung in the balance. “Aunty your fone dey ring” came the voice of a cleaner who had taken a particular interest in Amanda , but still she didn’t move , not until the cleaner shouted “Amandy Baby!”. She quickly turned to look, those words she hadn’t heard spoken together in about five years, not since she was a secondary school student at Federal government college Ebonyi, and now here she was in Abuja , hearing those words five years later.
“Ehen, I knew that it was you!” the cleaner continued, “It’s me Ashanti, do you remember me at FGGC , a set ahead of you…’ It took Amanda a few second to remember who the cleaner was, a former schoolmate of hers who dropped out of school in her penultimate year because she got pregnant, but Amanda pretended not to know her in order to prevent follow-up questions about her current situation. It did gave her some pleasures though, to see a person from her past doing worse than her, for all she knew, Ashanti never completed secondary education ,and even if she did, she didn’t get a higher degree education, not even an NCE, or else, what was she doing cleaning after sick people?
Amanda clutched this transient feeling of loftiness until it was smothered by the reality that Junior still lay half dead in the ICU. She scrambled through her bag for her phone and when she finally found it, she pressed the green button on it to accept the incoming call ignoring Ashanti who stood in disbelief. Amanda removed herself from the strangers gaze and walked down the corridor to answer the call.
The voice on the other side of the phone was her mother’s. They didn’t talk for long, there was nothing to talk about, nothing had happened since Amanda’s mother left the hospital, Junior was still in the ICU and nobody was talking to her yet. After the call, she turned to walked down the corridor back to her seat, back to her seemingly endless wait for any news from the ICU and with every step she took towards her seat, she was soaked in her past.
Bode was sweet and charming the way women like their men’ he was five years older and the love of Amanda’s life. Theirs is a typical Nigerian love story in the beginning-boy sees girls, boy likes girl, boy ask girl out, boy knocks girl down up and then denies the pregnancy. But Bode didn’t go through with the sequence, he owned up, and agreed to marry Amanda, and so it was that Amanda got married at 22 a few days after she got her NCE and 8 months later, Junior was born through a Caesarean Section that almost cost Amanda’s life.
When finally Amanda got back to her seat, Ashanti was gone and the corridor regained its deafening silence.
Life in Abuja didn’t deliver on its promises to be rosy, and so it was that Bode and Amanda moved from shack to shack , and on several occasions they slept in the meat stall with all the rooting viscera from the slaughtered livestock. After Junior was born, things got harder, from previous expensive CS required for his birth to the stupefying cost of his nursery education. To Bode, Junior was nothing but a seed sown by the devil in his life. After all, Junior was the cause of his early Marriage in the first place. Junior started all his misfortunes. Bode kept all these to himself, in the deepest recess of his mind was where he stashed these thoughts, too everyone. .
The door guarding the entrance to the ICU hadn’t moved at all since Junior was rushed in. It seemed to have been welded to the ground, not even the chill breeze that was blowing fear into Amanda moved it, even a little. And then suddenly the doctor, clad in his blue outfit steeped out; the expression on his face was less than wonderful.
The doctor had barely completely stepped out of the ICU when she accosted him. “Is my son Okay? Is he alright? How is he…? She poured forth her questions by the thousands. Shaking and trembling. When the doctor had managed to calm her down, he motioned for her to take her seat, and when she did, he sat next to her. Looking into her eyes, he began to deliver that elaborate speech they don’t teach in medical school, that speech given to relatives who just lost their loved ones on a hospital table. Yes, I mean that speech. “Your son suffered multiple laceration to his body and one particularly prominent one on his neck cut his carotid, but not completely, and so he bled out slowly. By the time you brought him here it was already too late, his brain had suffered acute hypoxic ischemia resulting in irreversible damage. This accompanied loss with loss of several other bodily functions rendered him…I am sorry, we tried our best to save him but …”
While the doctor spoke, Amanda remembered. She remembered the night of the fight with Bode. She remembered yesterday night, how Bode had come back to the stall with the stench of booze all over him, he was drunker than she had ever seen him. He was shouting and screaming at the top of his voice. “The devil must die today!” He sounded mad. Amanda and Junior lay on the ground where the mat was spread, awoken from their sleep, and they watched as their husband and father respectively was turning into something out of an asylum. “I said the devil must die today,” he continued and then he made for his butcher knife. This was when she took Junior in his arm and made for the exit, but she was quickly overpowered by Bode, who flung her to the side where she hit her head against the meat weighing scale on the counter and was knock out cold.
When she awoke, all she saw was junior lying unconscious with his body covered in cuts, and blood even spurted out in pulse from one cut on his neck. Bode was nowhere around, he seemed to have fled; some of his things were missing as she noticed that the shop looked emptier.
Six hours waiting outside the ICU only to be told that her life was over, she smiled at the doctor and said “Thank you. I am sure you did your best.” The doctor stood to leave, taken aback by how easily she received the death of her son. Meanwhile Amanda took out her phone from her bag and texted her mother, “I love you mum, don’t forget that.”
Minutes later Amanda was found lifeless on the bathroom floor of the hospital, she had convulsed to death. There was white froth on her mouth; apparently she had taken some unidentified pills from her bag.
By
Kingsley Okpi.
Department of Medicine and Surgery,
University of Nigeria Enugu Campus (UNEC),
Enugu
The above piece was first published in ‘The Student Doctor’, Official Magazine of the Nigerian Medical Students Association (NiMSA) in commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and Girls.
#OrangeTheWorld.
#No2GenderBasedViolence
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