The Living should Live more Deeply and Sincerely, in Honour of the Dead – An Elegy and Eulogy for Dr Stephen Urueye

I think about a lot of things most of the time, as all humans are bound to do or even forced and one of the things I thought about a lot during NYSC camp was Stephen Urueye (of blessed memory). I do not exactly think I have ever written about Stephen since he died. I won’t come up here and say I was close to him or stuff like that, ‘cause I wasn’t. Stephen was my course mate, my normal guy. He wasn’t a part of my inner circle of friends but people do not exactly have to be attached to your flesh for their demise to resonate with you – to ring with you. One of the things I sometimes felt about Stephen’s fate was the emptiness of the whole affair. Here I was in NYSC camp living the life, so to speak, and somewhere someplace Stephen too should be living his and experiencing all that I experience in his own way. Instead, he was not; there was a void in that other space and time.

Stephen represents more than just a young doctor that was snatched away from life brutally, he represents all of us young people being murdered at the height of our youth. You have to understand the dynamics of his death and the surrounding circumstances of the time to truly appreciate the depth of this tragedy. It’s been about two years since he passed on.

I remember that evening, I’d been chilling in my room looking at my WhatsApp, sharing gist on class group, suddenly Oyor posts “Stephen has been stabbed!”. I swear at that point the first thing that came to my mind was “Omo!! These guys dey chop life oo!!” I’m a very playful guy, I take very little things seriously, and in that time that Oyor posted it the first thing that came to my mind was “How much fun are these guys having that they managed to somehow stab themselves?!”
After we had all hustled for seven years in medical school (seven instead of six), we all graduated broke and tired. Suddenly, we started getting well-paid jobs in institutions all over the country for our housemanship. We were earning about 200,000 NGN. Imagine going from drinking Garri in medical school, poor and tired of life to immediately earning about 200,000 NGN.

Boys were untouchable. Medical practice was hard, yes, but it was fun too. On weekends, guys would drive to night clubs, to strip-clubs, we’d drink, we’d party, we’d drive very rough, we’d drive fast, we dressed good. Life was anew, we were “doctors” man. Nothing can touch us. Nothing! We were well-acquainted with the savageries of life. I mean, we worked in hospitals; we saw and smelled and touched death, but somehow death and decay still seemed far from us. We worked with death and disease and injury daily, yes, but we were on the other side of the fence, like jail-masters in a prison, untouched by the sentence, just helping along the victims of circumstances. And so it was, you know, we were the untouchables. I remember after one night of especially hard partying I thought to myself, “Damn! Boys are really doing well, man! Damn!”

So, when I saw “Stephen has been stabbed!”, I’m thinking to myself “someone probably stabbed him with a Biro in the arm or something light like that”, then I see the follow-up message, something like “We need assistance in the ER with CPR!” and I’m like wtf!! Stephen was not the type to be stabbed, in the sense that he lived a life devoid of that sort of violent space. If I and my guys got stabbed in a night club now, Ehen ehen! More reasonable, for we frequent such dark and violent spaces that at any point if anyone had pulled a gun or a knife on us during any of our night-crawls we would have deemed it a perfectly expected life hazard. Stephen was not the strip club kind of guy, or a night-crawler like us, he was one of those tall gentle consultants that walk with big bags and go from ward to ward about their duties and slouch forward from excess work. He liked his anime. He had his own crazy aspects yeah, but surely he wasn’t the craziest guy in class, definitely not the violent crazy type.

ER is the Emergency Room of every hospital where casualties or cases and rushed to for prompt medical care and attention, Ideally. CPR – Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation – is an emergency lifesaving procedure done make the heart beat and keep it heart beating, if successful. However, in the Nigerian healthcare setting, CPRs are rarely successful.

That fateful night it was raining and raining heavily as f**k. I remember ‘cause I ran to my car and as I was driving to the ER, I couldn’t see sh*t, and the lightning was terrible and loud, as though the heavens themselves knew. I rush into the ER and the first thing I saw was Jerry. He was pumping away at someone; sweating and tired. Jerry is 6ft 7inches, that’s a full 3 inches taller than I am, and way muscular than I am. I remember thinking that for him to be sweating that much, whatever he’s doing is really eating him out. I can’t see who’s he’s pumping out because there’s a small crowd gathered around him. Jerry looks up from his pumping and shouts, “Mosquito, come and take over!”, I’m wondering, “What? Is it that serious?”, I move fast through the crowd and I’m confronted by the stark image of Stephen, nude, bloody and unconscious.

There’s something jolting about seeing your own person on that gurney dying. I have seen hundreds of nude people, I’ve seen about a dozen people dying, but before then I had never seen my own person dying right before me. Experiencing death is itself something, but experiencing death of your own is miles different, the finality of the affair as well as the emotional cords that attach you makes it much deeper in hurt. To come forth from a thunderstorm to witness your person, who you’ve known for about 6 years in fullness of health, suddenly come to an unconscious body on a gurney, bleeding and gasping, slowly fading away, paling right before your eyes; nude, cold and vulnerable, with the sky crying behind you – It was jolting.

Doctors are supposed to be “mini-gods”, you know, the knowledge to take away pain and disease is “godhood”. When I fell sick in the US, I didn’t tell anyone, not even Yanni (my confidant at the time). Healthcare is very expensive, I had no health insurance and COVID made hospitals crowded as h*ll. I didn’t want to stress anyone, I simply opened my books, did a little research and found what was wrong with me. I couldn’t even order for drugs because I needed a doctor’s prescription, so I went to a veterinary website and I ordered a Vet equivalent. That was easier to get. I took my drugs and got better.

You see! Godhood! And to see someone like that, someone who had all that knowledge and all that power be reduced to this… Everyone around him had that power too, we knew what was happening to him, he was bleeding from an artery, he was going into shock, then he’d go on to cardiac arrest. The theory was not hard to figure out. Na the practical be the koko. That night Stephen was surrounded by more than 20 doctors and not one could save him. Not one, fam. Just one stab wound in one artery, Bruh, and Stephen who would read my WhatsApp stories and tell me I write well, would read them no more. Instead, I’d write about him in past tense. That sh** is crazy man.

You know, like I earlier said, if I got stabbed in a night club or on Eko Bridge, it would make some kind of sense; those are Hotspots. Many nights boys went out fully kitted for danger, we went out in numbers. Stephen was stabbed in front of LUTH itself, over a phone. Can you imagine being a doctor and being stabbed in front of your own hospital during a robbery for your phone? Bruh! Being stabbed barely months after becoming a doctor. Your clinical coat never even gum your body wella, and one infidel takes it all over a phone. Bruh!

Stephen didn’t die quickly, you know. Strong guy, strong as a horse. We kept pushing… I’d do CPR until I was exhausted, another man would take over, at first we only let strong people do the CPR, people like me and Jerry, towards the end, we let everyone do the CPR because all the strong men were exhausted. CPR is draining. Usually when doing CPR for a patient, you do till you get a bit tired then you give up.

Standing up there and doing CPR while staring at your guy’s face, man… and after some minutes of pushing till you feel your own heart giving, he’d twitch his hands showing he was still in there, and they’ll shout to you, “He just moved his hands! He just moved his hands!! Keep pushing, keep pushing” and you’ll be gingered. “It’s working, it’s working!!”, you’ll tell yourself, “I’m doing something for my guy! When he wakes up he’s going to buy me beer oo, I no go hear anything!” and we kept pushing, man. We really tried for the guy, we really tried, man.

So, seeing your guy go like that before you, it’s like watching a baton being handed over to you, to all of us – his guys – present there. It’s like him telling us, “I have done my share, dropped my plough, fought my battles, my journey has ended. Now take, my brothers, take my mantle and push on for me!”

Live fully – more sincerely in honour of the dead – and many times, I think of my guy, and I’m like, HUSTLE. It’s like when Jerry wrote once on his status about him wanting to be rich not because of a love of riches but because he understands that riches are the way to empower the brethren. It’s the same way with Stephen dying before us. We are forced to appreciate life more deeply not necessarily because we love life, but because now we’re not living just our lives, but we’re living also for our fallen brethren, we’re living for two. Living for self and for Stephen.

This morning was quite drab. I do my push-ups with Scot (my pet dog) licking my face, I pack my breakfast, my knees hurt. I open the gate, the sunlight is heavy on my face, hot and hard, I drive out. Everything is intangible, small things; but these are the things that make life, LIFE. Likewise, my grandma is no longer here for these little things, I had watched her die in my arms. Stephen is no longer here for these little things, I had watched him bleed to death on a gurney.

However, here I am, living memory of their existence. As long as I live their stories live and if your stories live, you too live – immortalized.

When I write, I write to me as much as I write to you.

Rest in Peace, Stephen.

About Author:

Dr. Sowole O. (The Redmosquito)
A dentist and an artist.