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October 19 � What A Day!
By Ayoola Olajide
I had gone to bed past midnight sleepless and for half an hour I hovered in that state suspended between wakefulness and sleep. Suddenly, I came awake, conscious, at the same instant, of pain all over my body. Within minutes I was gasping for breath as though I had been running a marathon.
Indeed a marathon or grim struggle of sorts was going on within me internally, the excruciating pain and difficulty in breathing being mere outward signals. The sympathetic and the parasympathetic were in declared battle, a complex battle which goes on normally unnoticed; no one could have told at that time where the consequence would lie for me, whether in favour of resolution or dissolution, continuity or discontinuity, equilibrium or breakdown.
I had had my first experience of bone pain crises (a consequence of sickle cell anaemia) in the aftermath of participating in a cross-country race at Ogbomoso Grammar School in 1976. Often times I have had time to �watch� as the pains ganged up and to scamper anxiously around for a (delaying) remedy. Other times the pains came not like a thief who knocks and breaks down the door but as one who blasts in through the roof.
For perhaps the first time in my long experience, I underwent pain so harrowing, so unrelenting, so punishing and so unthinkable that I reacted in a way I never did before: on the way to the hospital, I would beseech my sympathizers to hold on to this limb or that and, in the next instant, I would yell at them to �get their hands off me!� A 35-year-old friend recently spent 8 months lying on her back at the National Orthopaedic Hospital, Igbobi (she had problems with her hip, a not uncommon complication of sickle cell disorder in adults). At the peak of her discomfort, she told me, she would scream at anyone approaching her bed to go away. I was puzzled � what level of pain, what intensity of suffering, I wondered, would induce one to repudiate good manners?
Getting to hospital in those devilish small hours of Thursday October 19 was nothing short of a miracle, a testimony to the human instinct of selflessness in the face of a catastrophe. By 1 am it was obvious that I had to get to the hospital one way or another. Discounting the fact that it was pitch dark and the hour unholy, the unavailability of a car, personal or otherwise, meant that I would have to walk. I was in no shape to walk. I was restless, neither able to sit nor stand, lie down or keep still. I raved and screamed to high heavens in the bodily torture I was undergoing. The notion of a cat on literal hot bricks does not begin to describe the situation I found myself in. It was the tsunami of the body, �painquakes� called forth from deadly genetic inheritance. Frantic calls were made to private hospitals in the neighbourhood but either the doctors were not on duty or the line was unclear.
It was imperative to get to the hospital fast but how in my virtual prostration? My spouse volunteered to carry me on her back but with severe pain ravaging my chest, this was impossible. I was conscious of lashing pain all over my body, in and out, from the neck down. By the time I waddled a hundred metres outside our gate en route to the hospital, I slumped flat on the untarred road, unable and unwilling to go any further. It was around 1.30 am now. I could hardly speak above a whisper and all my reserves of strength was spent trying to suck in precious breath, breaths which came in quick painful gasps. My abdomen was rock hard and I was in dread how I was going to get out of the present quagmire in a long series of quagmires. Would I ever see this through intact or perhaps The End had come? I reflected that I did not mind it to be my Terminus in time � anything, even the Great Unknown, as far as it handed out promise of release from pain, was very welcome.
To cut a long story short, while I lay on the wet road wriggling and squirming in pain, my wife roused an elderly neighbour in an adjacent house who in turn roused a car-owner in the same house. They bestirred themselves, not bothering to enquire who was in trouble or why. As the car was being fetched, a doctor emerged as if from nowhere � Dr. Olugbade had heard the commotion as he was going to bed and concluding it was probably a medical emergency, came out to help. As we rushed post-haste to Ikorodu General Hospital, where Dr Olugbade worked, I rued the day I took my first breaths and achingly wished that these were the last.
With the aid of analgesics and antibiotics and the Force that had kept me going four decades, I called the bluff of the vaso-occlusive episode and the acute chest syndrome. I went back home within a week in pain much reduced, glad, for the kids� sake at least, to be alive.