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Isolated – Part Three

Life Uncategorized June 27, 2021 1 Comment

It is still day five.

I get up from the unsettling dream and inspect my torso for evidence of vomit or sweat or saliva and to my delight, I find none there. Then I rush to the bathroom because I’m feeling dreadfully sick. I support myself by resting my left hand on the wall facing the wash basin, slouch forward and basically stare absentmindedly into the sink. I make up my mind that I would be taking the test-to-release. This is a test that can be done on the fifth day of isolation, to release me to go out peacefully. I am sure I can’t take any more of this. I rinse my face and brush my teeth and then head back to the living room.

My plan is to pick up my novel, read a little bit of it and complete 3 modules of my e-learning courses but I end up scrolling through my phone and catching up on messages instead. As I head back to the couch which undoubtedly has become my favourite spot in this house, I notice that every joint in my body is audibly popping and for once I find the sounds grating. Like, I’m sort of alarmed. It’s as though all my joints are arthritic and are registering their displeasure that I even bother to attempt to move. Could this prolonged inactivity and immobility somehow account for arthritis in the elderly? I wonder.

Sometime during the reading process, I sleep off and my sleep is mercifully more restful, free of haunting dreams.

“Abiola”.

That’s the sound of my mom’s voice and it is accompanied by the creaking of the door which signifies she is trying to enter the room to access me. I roll my internal eyes because my sleep is actually sweet and restful and I don’t want it to end. She says, “They have come to look for us. Get your passport and mask and come downstairs”.

If it were someone else waking me up with those words, I would have considered it a prank or a rude joke and I would have just turned my back and gone back to sleep. But this is not someone else, this is my mom. My mom that’s famous for jinxing my attempt to sneak out to exercise because she does not “like breaking rules”.

So I get up, collect my mask and passport from where I have them stashed and go upstairs to wake my aunty. When we get downstairs, there is this government official outside, wearing a yellow, high visibility jacket, waiting for us.

He looks like a mix of Indian and Pakistani but his accent is hard to place. He is holding a smart device which has our names and phone numbers propped up on the screen. He asks my mom for her passport and what day of our self isolation we are on. Then he asks when exactly we arrived into the country. He has quite a bit of challenge pronouncing my moms name and apologises for it. The apology is “nice” and accepted but the name really isn’t that hard bro, especially given that there is an international celebrity who bears the same name.

After attending to my mom, he checks my document and leaves. All through this encounter, my aunt is watching from the window upstairs. We walk back inside the house and I roll my eyes, knowing that I’m not going to hear the end of this.

“You know I told you so. My friends were telling me they may have installed a CCTV to monitor us ……..” I zone out.

Like I said earlier. I already know I’m not going to hear the end of this.

Day 8 – Monitoring Spirits Alert

For some reason, guilt or maybe sensitivity has got the best of me. On day 5, I finally decided to take the test to release, because all the nightmares have haunted me enough to know that I would not last ten days in isolation. Test to release is basically taking an additional test on the fifth day os isolation so that you can be allowed to come out of the house without being considered to have violated isolation rules.

My test says I am negative and that means I am now finally free to roam the streets and interact with the outside world. But something keeps me indoors. Maybe it is guilt that my mom did not take the test and is still bound by the isolation rules, or maybe its me merely being sensitive and not wanting to rub my new found freedom all in her face. Or it could be that the outside world has suddenly lost its allure now that my freedom has technically been restored, you know! They say stolen meat is the sweetest, but now that the meat of my freedom is legally mine, I don’t feel drawn to stealing it. So I stay indoors and start to enjoy watching TV again. Talk about being a couch potato.

Its night time and my phone starts to buzz. First of all, I get an email saying someone on my flight tested positive to Covid 19 and so this means I have to isolate. (Guys, Laugh with me please). The first thing I do is to mark the message as “Unread” and archive it straightaway, I even dramatically look over my shoulder as I am doing it, because I am convincing myself that it technically doesn’t concern me. I am already 8 long dreary days into the prison sentence, I’m not about to start all over again. Secondly, my additional day-5 test has released me and there is no going back. So, it does not concern me. Amen.

Then my phone buzzes again and this time, a strange international number is calling me – In-The-Dead-Of-The-Night.

I pick up and its a government official calling to ensure that have gotten the email, the same email that I chose to ignore. He is also calling to tell me that all my negative COVID tests no longer count and my test-to-release is basically down the drain as I have to complete my isolation INDOORS for the 10 days. How sweetly convenient. How convenient it is, to wait until I have done a test-to-release, and felt the bliss of freedom, even if only fleetingly, to then call me and tell me that same freedom is being taken away because someone who I am very strongly sure I didn’t come into contact with on the Boeing seven-oh-seven has got the virus. How convenient!!!

Isolated – Part Two

Life June 6, 2021 2 Comments

Day Four.

The human innate ability to adapt is likely limitless. We are good at adapting to our situations, whatever it be. The brain is good at that. But does that ability to adapt have limits? Is there a point when our brains just decide that they are having none of this hardship and just quit, leaving us to suffer whatever it is that we have failed to adapt to?

I’m asking because, it seems my brain has gotten to this point. I have learned to adapt to working seventy-two hours at a stretch, I have adapted to running on less than 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep and still giving some version of my best to those I work with. I’ve had to finish my whole anatomy syllabus, in my “Keith Moore” in just 7 days, and I’ve read my “Kumar and Clark” as though its a novel. Don’t bother with these names, they are simply medical jargons. I’ve had to work three jobs simultaneously, at a time when I conveniently oscillated from being a doctor, to being a patient and then a visiting-patient relative and I! did ! not ! crack !.

My point is, I’ve adapted to hard conditions. My brain is very capable.

Why then, is my head finding it hard to adapt to rest? To temporary restriction in my movement?

Being forced to sit in the house and just catch my breath is not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve been able to catch up on sleep and on praying and some studies. I don’t even go out so much to be honest. If you told me to go outside now, I would have no idea where to go, other than the gym, grocery store or window shopping.

So why, just why, is my head making a big deal of having to stay at home for just 10 days? Is it merely the fact that I know that I am being restricted? or is it the human tendency to resist being governed?

Why is every indoor chore now seeming dull and dreary? I remember when I was working, I used to want to take days off to rest, I used to dream of saving a ridiculous amount of money up so that I could afford to go on a gap-year to explore the world.

Why then am I now tired of everything including eating and why is my head aching from inactivity?

Day Five

I’m seated in the dining hall, the one for senior secondary school students. There are 3 rows in the hall, each containing about 40 seats. Each seat can accommodate 4 people but I’m seated with just one seat mate and we are probably on the 26th chair on the row. I don’t know what it is that we are gathered here to do since we are evidently not eating, I just know that some of my classmates are walking up and down pretending to be coordinating us in our seating position.

Does that even make sense?

All doesn’t feel well. My joints continue to pop everywhere. They ache too. My head feels heavy and I don’t know what to do. I look beside my left to the face of the person seating with me and I realize I don’t know her, she doesn’t even feel familiar. Then I look away and face the ground, thinking hard as to why I’m in that room in the first place and why it is that we are not allowed to leave the dining hall.

Beside my foot, I notice a styrofoam-disposable self-closing-pack inside a nylon bag, I don’t need to think too far to know that it’s empty, although I don’t remember why it is there or why I think it is mine.My chest starts to feel warm, more like heat is ascending through it, making way towards my head and every strength in my aching joint starts to ache. I belge once, expecting air to come out, but instead, I’m greeted with my own vomit. The food I don’t remember eating has made an appearance in my mouth and now in my hands. So I tear two sheets of paper.

I place them on each other, cup them in the palm of my hands and throw up inside it. Throwing up is unlike me. I wrap the paper and before I can dispose it, I throw up a second time. Again, this is an unusual experience! When I’m sure I’m done throwing up, I get up to dispose it and walk up to someone that I identify as a collective guardian. I have the mind to explain to him that I need to get out of the building and some exception needs to be made for me because I am sick, but for some reason the memory of how that conversation went decides to elude me like a butterfly.

Some unknown amount of time passes and I find myself seating back on that seat for a second time. This time around, there are two more people on the seat and the space is not enough. I’m feeling choked, inconvenienced and very uncomfortable. And then I vomit again. This time around, it seems all of my bowels are intent on emptying themselves via the narrow orifice that is my mouth. I vomit and vomit and vomit again until I am quite sure I must have suffered an acute kidney injury.

Then I get up, damn the consequences and storm out of the dining hall. Aren’t dining halls supposed to be for eating? Why then has my experience been marked with food moving in the reverse order via my bowels?

I walk out using the back door and walk to the area we call the “reservoir” This basically is a long wall that contains a sequence of about sixteen to twenty functioning taps that dispense clean water. I approach one of the taps and rinse my mouth and my hands and also my head.

I feel so drained of life and in no time, I start to retch. I open my mouth attempting to allow the vomit one out but nothing comes forth, instead, my left shoulder starts to feel strangely cold. The kind of cold that makes me think I’m dreaming and may have been drooling onto my shoulders. So I open my eyes, with a start and realise I’m laid out on the couch, the couch in the living room where I am serving my isolation sentence.

Damn.

I’m still here.

My brain is not having any more of it and is now conjuring nightmares to haunt me.

And it is merely day 5.

Sweet Jesus.

Rescue me.

ISOLATED – PART ONE

Journals Life May 30, 2021 3 Comments

Day Zero

Yes. There is a day zero when you are self-isolating. They don’t start counting the 10 days until the day after you disembark from the plane.

A shame if you ask me. A shame and a waste of days to count.

After spending 3 hours standing on the line at the immigration control, Mr Y collects us and drives us home. Home for the next 10 days is my Aunt’s place where I happened to have stayed during my last visit here.

I’m too tired to sleep during the ride home.

I’m neither excited nor melancholic.

It just feels like doing something routine.

I’m grateful to be here, especially on the terms that comes with this visit. I’m happy because this is basically a dream come true. A dream that has been a long time coming, given the interesting events that went on last year.

We head to the grocery store, to pick up all the food we would require for the ten days period. The shopping is good too. It feels like clockwork. Has it really only been 6 months sinsce I last entered Tesco?

Once inside, the smell of fabric freshener is the first thing my senses register, and boy, it feels so familiar. Familiar and refreshing.

Familiar enough to make my eyes sting as my emotions finally catch up to me. I’ve missed this place since the six months that I have been here last.

It’s good to know that I’m here to stay and not just as a tourist.

I will make a home here and even more memories. I take a moment to collect myself before I start collecting all the junk I love to indulge in from the shelves.

Did I really go grocery shopping or am I dreaming it?

I don’t really know for sure.

Anyway, I’m vaguely aware of everything else around me as I toss and turn on my tiny bouncy bed. What is it with the British and small houses and hefty tax?

Day Three.

I’ve read novels and gotten tired.

I’ve scrolled the streets of Instagram and ridden the elevators of my WhatsApp up and down.

I’ve set targets and journaled my goals.

I’ve watched movies and even completed a series on Netflix – a good one by the way.

I’ve slept, and dreamt, and crashed, and died and resurrected.

I’ve eaten, binged, drank and snacked.

I’ve played music, danced and prayed.

I’ve called my friends and then stalked my emails.

And it is only 5 pm.

There’s still 7 hours before day 4 and then, there would be all the days left in this prison sentence until day 10.

This is unfair at this point.

I mean, what on God’s green earth justifies why I have to continue in quarantine when I’ve already had two negative PCR tests? I can understand if they are worried that the test I did at home is not up to their standards. But then, the test I took on day 2 came out negative and it was done by one of their accredited labs. Why do I still have to stay indoors, isolated from the world for another 8 days and still do another test?

What virus am I going to contract after day 2? It’s unfair if you ask me, and yes you have asked me because you are reading my journal. Maybe I should step out and take a breath of fresh air. Just a tiny, weensy, uncontaminated breath of fresh air on the outside. I’m thinking, surely that would not hurt. I lie down and force myself to sleep and only end up tossing and turning and tossing yet again.

Sometimes around 9 pm, I get up, change my skirt into black trousers and prepare to step outside to get fresh air. I go to pick up my phone and earpiece and find my mom in the sitting area watching movies. She asks where I heading to, and I respond, telling her that I need fresh air and would love to take a walk for a bit on the street.

She gives me her signature eye and says, ‘Don’t go. My friends have been calling me to warn me to stay indoors. They say the officials do random spot checks and may have specially installed hidden CCTV on the streets to monitor us”.

Hmm. My inner goddess pouts.

Mummy, hmmm !!!

For reals.

CCTV!.

I roll my eyes internally, instantly regretting that I came up to pick up my phone in the first place. Why does she have to jinx it with all this superstitious talk.

I mean, will Uncle Borris really tell his boys to be spying on me with special CCTV or to come and look for me at 9pm.

I roll my eyes again and collapse downcast into the ottoman by the window. I’m not one to disregard her warning. I feel like I have this luck where once someone says “so so so” before I do something bad, then it would come to pass and be jinxed, even if others get away with it.

This essentially takes all the fun out of whatever the action that “so so so” would have been and my taking this walk falls under that category. Now that she has spoken, a part of me just knows that she has jinxed it.

I change from my sitting posture on the ottoman into a kneeling posture and I look longingly outside. The streets, from my point of view, look so serene and quiet and lonely. Like it’s missing me. Like it’s beckoning to me.

They also look devoid of human life, as though suffering from the prolonged state of lockdown that this city has been in for the major part of the last year. The streets are calling to me and I’m here kneeling and just looking. Unbelievable! Can my simple 5 minutes intended walk really be jinxed by spot checks?

My mom gets up from the living room and heads to the room, possibly to sleep. As she goes, it occurs to me that she is also in this isolation with me and must be feeling the effects of the confinement just as I am, perhaps even more, although she has not complained as much. She must relate to my frustration in some way and if she really does relate, then she won’t want to kill my joy by jinxing my harmless idea. Right?

I return to a sitting position as my knees are hurting and my toes are tingling. I pick up the remote, shuffle pointlessly through Netflix, conclude that everything there is of little interest to me, turn off the Tv altogether and then return to binging on blueberries.

White Rice: A Tale Of Closure

Life November 29, 2020 21 Comments

It is the wedding eve – Friday night and the whole street is buzzing with excitement. Every house is feeling the anticipation of the coming celebration. My dad loves to throw parties and given that he is a people’s person / crowd puller / “man of the people”, ? he almost always goes over board while throwing them.

The house at this point, is already full to the brim and by full I mean, all the bedrooms are occupied with guests, the chairs in both parlors are fully booked like a suite, even my mom’s precious kitchen is not spared for we have had to bring out the compressible beds and mats to host people there. We have also run out of bedsheets, blankets and wrappers to pass around to our guests. There are more than 20 of my mom’s friends and family around, each volunteering one essential skill or the other.

Some of them are skinning the meat, some slicing onions or carrots or condiments. Some have taken it upon themselves to sort out souvenirs while others are holding the usual vigils in the tents ; Vigils where alcohol and music are the holy anointing raining down from the heaven my father has created.

It is also a day of random dancing, where while moving from point A to B, I’d randomly stop halfway and dance to “o baby sawale, Sawa sawa sawale” before I catch myself and move on with whatever I have to do.

Of course, that amount of crowd and activity means one thing for me – endless errands. ??
“Biola, where do you guys keep this”, or “Biola, please get us matches or an extra knife or fuel or salt or tinned tomatoes etc”.
You get the gist.
Every volunteer needs something and I am being constantly tossed up and down the stairs, to and fro the garage and in and out of different storage rooms.

NIGHT

It’s night time, probably around 11 pm and I am exhausted to my bones. I sit up on my mat that I have managed to hustle for myself because yeah, I had to give up my bed too.
I am trying laboriously to fix my own nails myself when I hear the unmistakable footsteps that can only belong to my dad.

Something tells me that his visit is likely errand oriented and specific to me so I lay down and pretend to be asleep. ?? Pardon the sixteen year old crook that I am. (I’m sure you’d have done the same too)

My dad comes into the room, with his special smile that lights up his eyes, my moms world and literally the entire universe, wakes up the “sleeping” me, ( so much for my game of pretense right ??) and tells me he is hungry and needs me to cook his food.

I remember saying “Daddy, there’s food at home. Your sisters prepared pounded yam for you”. This persistent man says, “ I know, I want rice and I would really like to have your special white rice, the one only you can cook”.?

First of all, white rice is not special.?‍♀️ You literally toss washed rice inside water plus or minus onions and some salt and the rest is history. So why all this hyping of such a mundane food?

Second of all, what is special about my own white rice, what about it can only I cook? There are many people downstairs who would happily cook for him. Why come to bother a visibly exhausted and unwilling me. ?

Thirdly, what typical Ekiti man says no to pounded yam that was made specially for him only to come wake a teenager for white rice? ?‍♀️
Ko add up fa …

I grumble on the inside and reluctantly stand up, begin the laborious journey down the stairs and all through the while, Oga is hailing me, calling me all my pet names and so excited that I am actually going to cook for him. Like I have a choice? ?‍♀️

I don’t understand it really. In my head, I’m lamenting the nail polish I have poorly applied on my nails that would definitely get smudged while washing the rice.
I’m also lamenting the time I could be spending relaxing and getting my beauty sleep in.

The night passed, the wedding came the next day and by Sunday, my dad died peacefully on my thighs, right in front of my eyes. Read more here.

Selah.

Naturally, a crowd gathered in our house again, not to celebrate this time but to mourn.

As a part of grieving process in a bereaved house, people tend to verbally reminisce on memories of the departed. I remember walking past a gathering of people doing this when I heard the words “I trust Biola to take care of me, she always does.”

Upon hearing my name, My ears prick as expected and I listen super closely.
One of the commentators happen to be my aunt so I call her aside to inquire further what the discuss is about.

She says, “On Friday evening, we offered your dad pounded yam and he rejected it and when we asked him what he was going to eat in place of it, he told us not to worry about it and boasted that his baby doc (which is me, last time I checked) will have something special planned for him as she always does”.

???

Wait! Did I just hear “as she always does”??‍♀️???

Phew !!!

Thank you Aunt.

Phew again.

Upon hearing this, I run into my room, close the door and cry out a fresh amount of tears.

Why was my father boasting of me taking care of him?

“As she always does”??? — What is that supposed to mean and how am I supposed to feel about that?

Why did he reject that pounded yam and come up for my rice that I had not even yet cooked?

Why did he boast saying I always take care of him, when in essence, what I did in place of that was grumble from my room to the kitchen and back about little things like my nail polish and my being tired?

I’m crying and crying and crying and I realize somethings.
That my dad genuinely knew and actively basked in the knowledge that I loved him, enough that he could boast about it behind my back and especially without having approached me with his request.

And that he loves me wildly – Loves me enough to choose me and my grumbling exhausted company over something “special” made by a stranger,

Loves me enough to stay with me while I cooked the “white rice” and cheer me up,
Loves me enough to have boasted back and forth about little and big things about me.

As these thoughts come to my realization, I start to feel that I have done something right in my short life. And by so doing, I have given myself closure. I have done right by communicating verbally and via my actions to someone I deeply care about.
I have gifted them the “gift of knowing”
Knowing just how much they mean to me.

Click here to see more about how I really felt.

Help! I wasn’t ready.

Life June 11, 2020 34 Comments

The first time I saw someone die, it felt like a joke and I simply wasn’t ready for it. I was seated beside the fellow, absentmindedly listening to him as he talked with someone else who was seated adjacent to us. Without warning, he suddenly fell on my thighs and breathed his last. My first words were “get up, you know you weigh a ton “ (I said that jokingly, like I always do).

It was not until 4 different doctors certified him dead before I could believe the fellow had actually passed on. It took 7 months of trauma and living in denial before I could come to terms with the fact that I’d never hear this person talk again. Till date, I still grope mentally when trying to navigate that event.

ps: that weighty fellow was my dad. read more here

The second experience had the same effect on me, I still wasn’t ready. This time around, I walked into my patient’s room, introduced myself and took her consent to check her blood pressure. She replied, “go ahead”. I inflated the cuff of the sphygmomanometer and set the stethoscope to my ears, hoping to hear some real korotkoff sounds but I heard nothing.

I inflated again because as expected, every living human should have a recordable systolic blood pressure but still there was no sound.

By the time I looked up to tell the senior doctor that I wasn’t hearing anything, the patient had already breathed her last breath.

That day was my first day at work. Talk about ‘gbas-gbos’.

Strike 2, we immediately started CPR (a super-hero energy sapping exercise we doctors love to do to raise the dead?). Pushed 1ml of adrenaline to woo her heart into beating once more and all through the time , I kept asking myself “Is this how it happen to all of us ?”

We continued the CPR for 45 minutes, pushed in more adrenaline, intubated and did every other thing medically possible. All through the while, I was in turmoil because for starters, nature was calling for the major ?, hunger pangs were liquefying my empty stomach, my uterus was grating away at what little strength I had in my body and my mind was stuck on a strange loop chyming repeatedly “is this how it will happens to all of us?”

These days, it’s more or less easy, I can recognize the wink of death in a human body even when it’s in denial, especially after the soul has long departed. It’s now easy for me to interpret the inevitable events once I see the human heart desperately swinging from hypertension to persistently low BPs despite tons of NORAD.

I understand what’s coming once I see two weak lungs gasp in unison and pant in defiance for the air we carelessly pollute with tobacco, as they refuse to be dragged into the peaceful oblivion that death is.

I now know that dying is easy, living is hard! Moreso, living intentionally. We will all die, whether we are ready or not. Struggling to stay alive is what saps the energy out of a man. Knowing this, I ask myself, am I ready?

Since I’m not ready to die, the least I can do is be ready to live. And not just live, but live intentionally, to choose the life that I want even when walking through the valley of death. I choose to live like I mean it, not absentmindedly but living everyday with the intention to live.

ps: I do hope you got all the pun intended??