By ADESOLA AYO-ADERELE
I got to know this amazing woman at a Save the Children week of training for journalists in Abuja about 15 years ago. It was about maternal and child health and Hajia, along with two other young mothers, had shared their maternal journey when the facilitator casually asked mothers in the group if they had any story to tell about their childbirth experience.
All the near-death-experience stories were touching, but Hajia’s own touched me the more because a child was the victim. She had had Ahmed, her third and last child, and almost immediately the baby was handed to her, she told the doctors that she noticed something odd about him; but they dismissed her concern as the obsession of a new mom and sent her home.
Days after, when her mom came to help with the baby, she also noticed the same thing and they eventually returned him to the hospital where the doctors detected for the first time that the baby had neonatal jaundice. He was about a week old by then.
As usual, there was no facility for admission for a sickly newborn in the hospital and the young mom was given instructions to go back home and set up a complicated medical procedure. Obviously, she didn’t know anything about what the doctors knew was a ruinous condition, and she went to do as told. It was when friends who worked in healthcare visited, saw the criminality the Nigerian hospital had foisted on her, that they compelled her to return the dying baby to the hospital.
The hospital was still adamant that there was no space for the terribly sick baby as every bed space was filled as usual. The half-mad mom had had enough and when the hospital staff saw that they could have two dead humans to contend with, they reluctantly gave her a space near an occupied bed, and she was responsible for paying for everything that was needed to treat the baby, including phototherapy, installation of wall sockets, lighting and every normal thing a normal hospital should have.
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By the time the doctors discovered their life jail-worthy error, the damage had been done and bilirubin had passed into the brain of Rafat’s newborn and had caused brain damage.
The room stood still by the time Rafat concluded her brave story with heart-rending sob. She ran into the bathroom, and I followed hard on her heels. I held her, and tried to console her as much as I could.
May the Lord console everyone connected to Rafat, and may Ahmed keep flying on the wings of his mom Rafat’s incredible investment in him.
I noticed that in all the narration, there was no mention of the child’s dad. So, I asked, ‘What about the dad?’ She hissed and said, ‘Who knows where he is!’
We became friends since that day.
Ironically, Rafat’s estranged husband is stupendously rich, according to her. A multimillionaire with landed property in Abuja, she said; making me to wonder if divorcing a wife also means divorcing the kids you had together because, according to her, she was solely responsible for Ahmed’s hard upbringing, with the attendant heavy spending that goes with raising a child that needs special care.
Anyone who followed Rafat and Ahmed’s story would attest that the story told here isn’t a betrayal of trust or a callous exposition of her secret. It’s a story she told at any opportunity, including on her Facebook wall and Ahmed’s YouTube channel as she gleefully detailed her son’s incredible progress and activities. The story is simply out there, nothing new.
Then I was shocked to see Rafat on a wheelchair being assisted by no other person than Ahmed last Friday and I quickly chatted her up. The diagnosis of her condition? Unknown cause. That’s the Nigerian doctors for you.
You present in Nigerian hospital with an illness and they send you for every pocket-tearing tests possible. After exhaustive, money-guzzling tests that sometimes violate your body and leave you with fresh pain you didn’t enter the hospital with, the average Nigerian doctor will most likely tell you that nothing is wrong with you, while, in the same breath, they’ll pile you with outrageous quantity of costly drugs that can give you liver and kidney failure in a week if you follow their criminal prescription.
It’s too bad that Muslims don’t do postmortem. Rafat’s kids would probably have a tidy sum to claim from a hospital that returned ‘unknown cause’ for a condition that sent a healthy woman to the wheelchair, while they placed her on steroids and muscle relaxants.
May the Lord console everyone connected to Rafat, and may Ahmed keep flying on the wings of his mom Rafat’s incredible investment in him.
Rafat was a mother like no other! Goodbye, friend.
