Bolaji:Those mosquitoes in Nigeria are beyond control. They can frustrate any teaching hospital anywhere. Their effects are difficult to diagnose. If at all. Here is a man who left Abuja hearty and healthy. And within an hour of flight, his health was a big concern. Why? Mosquitoes. Trust me. Mosquitoes are to blame.My friend Dr. Olowopopo is not here to confirm my story. But every time I get a fever after visiting Nigeria with all due precautions, I would run to his hospital in Chicago and yell mosquitoes. They would then keep me for four days until the suckers' effects are obliterated.A man was healthy and hearty one day. And after an hour's flight from Abuja to Enugu, his health was a concern. Serious concern. We should blame the British. They forgot to take the mosquitoes with them. And don't blame UNTH.
And I amEzeana Igirigi AchusimOdi-IsaaNwa Dim OriohaSent from my iPhoneMy People:QUOTEThe doctors and nurses that attended to me continued to wonder why my blood pressure refused to come down. How could the blood pressure of a social crusader, as me, come down after witnessing how the teaching hospital of my alma mater, the first indigenous university of my 53 year-old nation, has become a huge joke and had truly transformed into the 'university of Nigeria death hospital'. I had kicked to be discharged because I knew that if I had stayed longer, I would have developed a permanent, and perhaps, incurable mental dent. Those 12 days were a nightmare and without the care of those nurses and my friends, I would have gone raving mad.UNQUOTELord have mercy.....gallows humor!Maybe this article's attention to UNTH will lead to an improvement, and introspection in other UTHs....and kick-in of the NEEDS assessment money.And there you have it.Bolaji AlukoShaking his headUche ExechukwuI apologise to my teeming readers for this three-week absence. The reason is encapsulated in my choice of this title which has also become my reflection on the 53rd anniversary of Nigeria's independence which we celebrate tomorrow. It also happens that tomorrow's 'celebration' will be the last we shall encounter before the bigger one of next January which will mark a century of the attainment of Nigeria as a single 'geographic expression', as one of our founding fathers once described it.
On Thursday, 5th of this month, I was undertaking a brief routine trip to my home state, Anambra State, but could not complete the journey. On departure, I was feeling hale and hearty, but on alighting at the Enugu airport on the first leg of my journey, I suddenly took ill. It was with a superhuman effort that I could walk down from the aircraft to the terminal building to meet my waiting friend, Chief Phil Ezeogu, with whom I was going to drive to Anambra State. I was panting for breath, became feverish, physically drained and overwhelmed. I felt like someone suddenly struck by a juju.
One thing followed the other and a doctor who was contacted promptly came to my aid after I had aborted my trip to Awka but had checked into a hotel instead, hoping to stabilize and return to Abuja the following day. When the doctor arrived, he pronounced that my condition was not good at all and that I would need to be hospitalized. With his initial observations, he feared that my heart was failing. I told him that I would prefer to return to Abuja where I would have the members of my family to care for me at the hospital and where I had doctors who were conversant with my health history. He doubted if in my condition, I could fly.
I could also not go by road because I was gasping for air and could not stay in an air-conditioned car. It was by miracle that I had survived the night till the following Friday morning. My friend Phil and I had no option than to agree with the doctor to rush, as early as 5.30am, to the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH) where he worked. We drove behind the doctor who hardly took his bath, to the teaching hospital which is situated over 25 kilometres out of Enugu. The doctor who also worked there had insisted that we should get there early enough so as to meet up with the staff that had not gone away from their night shift.
We were there at 6 am and Dr. Umeh enjoined on his colleagues at the Emergency post to take up my case without undue protocol. They did and besieged me like a swarm of friendly bees, checking my temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure, glucose level and every other thing. They ruled my case a bad one and pronounced that "we shall admit you here". As I lay there helplessly, I quickly took in the entire environment that was reeking with urine and my mind conjured the refugee hospitals that I saw so often on the television or a hospital in the war-torn Biafra. I looked around and saw patients lying and groaning forlornly in beds scattered in that open emergency ward. The place was obviously unfit for a Nigerian, I thought, yet, there they were, hoping, as the doctors and nurses worked around the clock, for the best. I silently beckoned to Phil to inform him that instead of being admitted there, I should be allowed to die elsewhere.
Through the magical combination of my friend's wizardry, wits and with the help and contacts of the Good Samaritan doctor who had brought me in the first instance, I acquired an 'accommodation' at the five-star-like part of the hospital, which is actually a place named the 'Private Suites', a veritable oasis in the squalid desert environment of the UNTH, the biggest medical facility in Eastern Nigeria. I had arrived the UNTH at 6am on that Friday, but it was not until 5pm that I was finally wheeled into one of those private suites, long after my worried wife had arrived, having driven all the way from Abuja, when she learnt I would no longer return.
In between, I had been dumped at the Emergency hall, watching two shifts come and go, and preyed upon by teachers and their medical students who feasted on me and my misfortunes, with none caring for the extreme pain and discomfort that I was physically and psychologically subjected to. One unit even callously conducted their practical examination with my condition, forcing out barrages of answers from me. It was a veritable nightmare.
But I helplessly accepted my dire situation. Even in that my pitiable physical and psychological state, my wounded mind roved to my secondary school days when one tailor whose apprentice had messed up my pair of shorts had disagreed with me when I queried why he had given my material to his apprentice to sew. He had reasoned with me thus: "Should a barber learn how to barb with the head of a goat?" Yes, I agreed that medical students should learn and conduct their tests with and on people, like me, who had the misfortune of being brought, in spite of themselves, into their clutches, as I had been that morning. But I also imagined that part of their training should have included ensuring that a patient received a minimal level comfort before being turned into a specimen. On that day, I started understanding what it really meant to be a real-life guinea pig of a failed nation and its institutions.
When as a student of the UNN in the late 70s, I had gone to the original UNTH to visit a friend who had sustained injuries from a car crash. I met him hospitalized in a clean open ward, attended to by happy, chatty and polite nurses and doctors, in professional gait and mien; I silently wished that I should also become a patient there to enjoy such lavish care. A patient was treated like a king by a happy and contented crop of professionals. His recovery was quick and assured. But when fate and ill luck forced me into the bowels of the same UNTH over 30 years later, and into a VIP suite, expecting 30 years of improvement, there was no further proof that Nigeria, as a nation, had been hurtling very rapidly in the reverse, during these 53 years of its existence as a nation. And lest you forget, UNTH is of those places which the Nigerian state regards as 'a centre of excellence' in health delivery.
I was hospitalized at the UNTH for 12 clear days and emerged mentally damaged and psychologically traumatized by my experiences. I must remind the readers that I obtained the best in personal care and attention that the equally helpless hands around me could afford under the woeful circumstances and conditions that they operate. The nurses at my special ward were perhaps the most professional and polite Nigerians I have encountered in my life. While I cannot say the same about the dedication of some of the puffed-up doctors, I can vouch for the diligence and application of many younger doctors who attended to me.
I must however put on record that for the 12 days of my hospitalization, the consultant who heads the unit that admitted me never turned up for one second. Even on several occasions when my case took a turn for the worse, and my friend, Phil sent her text messages, she neither replied to any of those messages, nor picked the calls, not to talk of ever appearing in person. Instead, it was the young house officers and young registrars who were at my beck and call.
Needless to say that without the 24-hour care and attention of Phil and members of his family who shuttled endlessly between Enugu and the hospital to ensure that I lacked nothing, I would have died. I need to stress too, that at the UNTH, our centre of excellence, if you have nobody with and around you, 24/7, you will die! And I am not joking. I do not wish my worst enemy to be admitted there.
The doctors and nurses that attended to me continued to wonder why my blood pressure refused to come down. How could the blood pressure of a social crusader, as me, come down after witnessing how the teaching hospital of my alma mater, the first indigenous university of my 53 year-old nation, has become a huge joke and had truly transformed into the 'university of Nigeria death hospital'. I had kicked to be discharged because I knew that if I had stayed longer, I would have developed a permanent, and perhaps, incurable mental dent. Those 12 days were a nightmare and without the care of those nurses and my friends, I would have gone raving mad.
Here is a teaching hospital from which we turn out doctors that would cater to patients, yet it lacks the most basic facilities that are found even at the small private clinics elsewhere. I was admitted at UNTH as a cardiac patient, yet there is no ECG machine, cardiac echo machine or the other basic investigation facilities. Unbelievable? But it is true. Even when I could not walk, was ferried by my friend to Enugu, to undergo an ECG and heart echo at a facility privately owned by one of the cardiology consultants at the UNTH. Whether the allegation that the consultants at the hospital would not allow the equipment at UNTH to work so that patients would patronize their private clinics, is true or false, is neither here nor there. The fact remains that the most basic facilities that one finds at the ordinary hospitals are non-existent at the UNTH (and perhaps at the other teaching hospitals in the country).
You would wonder: as modern medicine is mostly technologically based, and there are hardly any modern facilities at this federal government owned 'centre of excellence', why would anyone want to go to any teaching hospital, except to go there to die, or if, as was my case, going there was the final option. What is the notion of 'excellence' by our leaders? For how long can the patient continue to rely on the 'magical' knowledge of the Nigerian doctor at a public hospital, when is trusted to diagnose and treat ailments without modern facilities to guide him in investigating them? I saw the doctors at the UNTH as modern-day dibias, who work through divination, trusting their limited human faculties. They are like Nigerian policemen who crack crimes without the benefit of modern forensics.
On the very day that I was admitted at UNTH, my blood specimen was taken for the several tests prescribed by the doctors. The results of those tests came out the following Thursday – six clear days after – following the frenzied interventions and complaints to higher authorities by my friend. Yet, for those six days, the doctors had continued 'treating' me, pumping me with injections and oral drugs, almost blindly, I daresay. When the results of the tests came out, the doctors were compelled to start adding and subtracting from their copious drug list. Needles to say that when I returned to Abuja and having now gone to a private and modern hospital, where the repeat of those and more tests were ordered, it is looking obvious that my long sojourn at the UNTH had amounted to a mere first aid, while most of the tests had proved defective. Hence, your guess as whether I would keep the appointment given to me to report at UNTH on October 2nd, is as good as mine.
Nothing that I have said here or will still write later about the harrowing situation I encountered at UNTH Enugu should be taken as an aspersion on the diligence and dedication of the men and women who toil day and night, trying to enact modern day miracles, with bare hands. You encounter hundreds of frustrated men and women bumping into each other on the poorly –lit corridors, while trying to eke miracles out of nothing. This is in face of the worsening incidence of the sick and ailing Nigerians whose numbers are growing exponentially. Many of them whisper and wonder why you ever brought yourself there and when you describe the circumstances of your coming there, they shake their heads in pity.
My experience at the UNTH clearly brought to me what the university teachers are talking about and I became even more mentally wounded as I contemplated the fate of my two children who are marooned at home by the ASUU strikes. Yet, I said to myself that if the situation at the UNTH was symptomatic of what the university teachers are talking about, then the teachers are doubly justified in spite of the pains of us parents and students.
From these experiences at the UNTH – a situation which I am sure is replicated at the other tertiary medical institutions, just like at the government universities – it is obvious that between now and January when Nigeria would come a full circle in our hundred years as a country, Nigerians must have some clear and salient questions to pose to ourselves and find answers to in order to save our individual and collective lives. No nation can afford to live much longer like this. There is no doubt that Nigeria has fallen into two clear nations – one of a few people swimming in corrupt and decadent affluence, affording all the good things of life and mocking the teeming population of the members of the other Nigeria who are being despoiled, deprived and bruised daily.
At 53, Nigerians must make a decision as to how much longer this unjust situation would be allowed to endure. To think that it could continue much longer like this would be sheer illusion.
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