Every time people come online to drag doctors, you see a lot of venom. A lot of fire and brimstone falling from the heavens. “Nigerian doctors are this… Nigerian doctors are that! They have no soul! They’re all about the money, they’re selfish, cold, inhumane… They’re beasts… They’re killers…”. Of course, I’ve only been a Nigerian doctor for a short while, and of course, when I see these stories, I am torn. For I respect the voices and the pain of the masses, but I am on the other side – the “doctor” side and I know how it is. How it has been and how I too have suffered.
How I have had to watch people die for things they should never have died for and how I was so powerless to do anything about it. In the eyes of the relatives, I too must have been seen as a monster.
When I began as a doctor, the first thing that struck me were “gloves” – the lack of it thereof. A carpenter needs hammer, a soldier needs guns. A fisherman is nothing without a boat. A doctor, well, a doctor is almost nothing without gloves and facemasks (his personal protective equipment) and o my God! Was there a scarcity of gloves and facemasks. Without gloves, I couldn’t touch anyone. Back then, there was no COVID or Ebola, and it is deemed madness to use bare hands to examine one person and then examine another; the plethora of diseases I could both transfer and incur upon myself is beyond comprehension.
Then, what did I do? Of course I had to do something, I had to still see the hospital’s patients. So, I became a “thief”, a raging criminal in white coat, an agbero doctor. I would go to my Nurses to ask and they’d say, “Dr Sowole, No gloves and facemasks oo!”. “What do you mean by that?”, I would ask, already angry. “No gloves and facemasks. You can go and Check! The department doesn’t have again”, she would reply. And truly, they were out of facemasks and gloves – it’s hard to explain. It’s not like anyone was stealing the facemasks and gloves. It’s just the way the system was designed; It was poorly funded. I’d ask up the chain of command, and there was never really any sort of explanation. I guess it’s just the way the country is, poorly funded. People that sometimes struggled to even pay our salaries, is it now gloves they can easily give us?
So, I had to do the next available thing. If my department didn’t have gloves and facemasks, surely another department would. I’m a smooth guy, I have friends in other departments, friends in all specialties. I’d walk over to another department, chat sweetly with the Nurse, move a little close to the pack of gloves, cover it with my coat as I’m smiling at the Nurse. “Nurse B, You know you have a lovely smile”, I’d say. She’d smile and close her eyes for two seconds and like the thief that I am, I’d stuff my coat pockets with half a dozen gloves in that short time. My fingers were fast.
Sometimes, I could not steal or I was caught, if you steal everyday in about 4 departments, they will sooner or later identify you as a criminal. “Please, just two gloves, please!”, I’d beg the Nurses. “We need gloves in our own department too, we don’t have enough for our unit”, they’d reply. But I’d beg and cajole, as if the patients were my own family members. I could simply take a casenote and sign, saying “Patient could not be seen due to lack of gloves and facemasks!”. Yes I could, it was very well within my right to refuse seeing a patient if I had no materials. But what good would that do? The patient goes back home in pain, not understanding that I actually have no power in me to do anything. In his mind’s eye, I am villain.
I became notorious in the clinic. Anytime the nurses saw me, from afar they’d begin to warn me and their other staff. “Dr Sowole, don’t enter here oo, stay outside! We have no gloves. Junior-Nurse, hide the facemask, hide the gloves. Dr Sowole is coming oo, he’s coming! He’s coming. Don’t let him enter here o! Our facemask will soon loss”. If I’m struggling for facemasks and gloves, you can imagine what more I was struggling for. When your doctor has to run laps for basic things like “gloves” which brain power will be left in my head to render proper care to you. But still, we try. Nigerian Doctors are badass like that.
I remember one time, in surgery we had this young girl in theater, we were operating her for a cancerous tumor in her Jaws. Her bill was taken up by this NGO (can’t really remember which one now) and while in the theater, we’d been there for about 6 hours already or so, when they called for blood – well, guess who had to go running for blood after 6years of medical school? Yh, that’s right, me! The most junior doctor. I change out of my theater scrubs, run to the blood bank, those ones start speaking English saying there’s no blood. Unlike facemask and gloves, blood is not something anyone can steal, if I could steal blood, trust me, for my patients, I would. If there’s no blood it simply means there’s no blood, because that is how Nigeria is.
I argue and argue with them, try to cajole and sweet talk but No blood means no blood. This girl, the patient, had donated blood to the hospital before her surgery, by bringing her family members and friends, so she’s entitled to a particular number of blood pints. But for some sick twisted reason or the other, the blood bank has been strained by other patients who didn’t follow this protocol and used more blood than they donated. So, I rushed back to the theatre with the grim news. “The blood bank says there’s no blood, Sir”, I tell the team of surgeons, my senior doctors. “What do you mean there’s no blood?”, the head surgeon inquires angrily, “Go and get me blood!”. In my head, “Go and get you blood bawo?! Maka Gini!! Biko, where will I get you blood? My nickname is Mosquito no mean say I get blood for my fridge na”. At this point, I can see the young girl bleeding out on the table, white as a ghost.
When you lose blood, all your skin loses colour, you become pale as paper. There’s a level of white you turn when you’ve lost so much blood, even your tongue begins to whiten like beach sand because we had no blood we begin to infuse her with substitutes. You know, something like it – but not it – just to keep her heart going. In my mind, I’d honestly already written her off. I was like “Nah, there’s no way she can make it, she’s lost too much blood!” She was so white, so cold, like marble! I was surprised the surgeons were even still working on her, still trying to patch her up. It was amazing. It was obviously a lost cause. Any normal person could see that. In my mind, only an Ogbanje (A spirit) could survive that.
Blood did later come, after a long while, after many hours and surprisingly, this babe did not die. She made it! Made a full recovery, I was surprised as f***. She must have been an Ogbanje, I ended up concluding; But of course, she wasn’t. She survived by virtue of pure skills of those surgeons. Those guys were good. Which is one thing that held LUTH up; the staff was world-class, many times the best of the best, they knew how to improvise, manage and manage in scarcity. LUTH doctors and Professors are part of the best in Africa, routinely leaving the country and making huge waves abroad. The issue was the system, not the doctors themselves.
The health system suffers from too much “Nigerianess” and the patients bear the death, while the doctors bear the curses.
About Author:
Dr. Sowole (The Redmosquito)
A dentist and an artist.
