I woke my wife up with a phone call around 4:45 a.m. I was working in Lagos, over 1,000 km away from my family in Abuja…in a different part of the country altogether. “Please pay attention to these kids.” I said, after the usual husband and wife conversation. This was my real reason for calling since I had just had another dream in which I watched one of my children reach up and tip over a pot of hot liquid…My wife acknowledged my concern and we hung up.
Barely two weeks later, I got the call every father dreads when working away from their family. My daughter had had an accident in school a week earlier and I was just being informed after several attempts to treat her failed to yield tangible results. My daughter, a sweet 3-and-a-half year old, was the third of four children. The first two were boys and the last was a 10 month boy as well. I took the next available flight out.
When I got home, I met a grim situation. Apparently, my daughter had been running away from a class-mate playing chase during break-time when she jumped off an embankment and did not land very well. Left leg, the tibia or fibula…it did not matter. I saw a pale, hurting and frightened little girl who had been calling for her dad for the past week.
After putting my wife in a positive mood with a few words of encouragement, we took stock of the situation and decided to go back to the general hospital where they had gone for treatment earlier.
At the general hospital, we queued up till it was our turn then stepped into the doctor’s office. A youthful looking young lady doctor greeted us warmly and referred to our case file briefly. She took a look at an x-ray that had been taken of the left leg. After a moment, she advised that we took another x-ray of the leg since she really couldn’t form an opinion based on the one she had. We consented and headed off to the x-ray section.
About an hour later, we were back with a new x-ray photograph. The doctor spent what appeared to be an unusually long time studying it before excusing herself. She came back with a colleague and together they studied the photo again then deliberated briefly before she scribbled into the case file and that was that.
The lady doctor had put us on a treatment comprising 12-hour injections which we brought our daughter to receive every day. I sought and was granted a 2-week leave to attend to this emergency family matter. After 5 days, my little girl was still hurting, the leg was still swollen and I had had enough of the youthful doctors. I discovered later on that the consultant physicians, who had more experience and resources to call on, were on strike. In desperation, I called my father, who turns out to be a retired academic. We decided to relocate the case to a private hospital owned and run by his colleague.
The elderly doctor who now took over the case glanced at the x-ray for a minute and pronounced something like…osteomyelitis. With the ease and confidence of over 40 years practice, he put the leg in a cast, prescribed drugs and a fresh round of treatment began.
Several months later, the infection had become a thing of the past BUT we now had another problem: the leg had what the doctor called dead-bone. This meant that the leg would have to be operated upon to remove the dead bone in order to avoid future complications. OK. I braced up for more anxiety and expenses. The doctor called my wife and I for a chat. He told us about a certain biomedical treatment being offered for testing by the Japanese. It involved implanting a non-organic material to bridge the gap that would be produced when the dead bone was removed. This material was being offered free as long as we would not mind the results being published in medical journals. My daughter might come out famous? After asking many questions, we agreed to go along with this offer. We got a date for the operation and it was done in a few hours.
It was discovered on opening the leg, that the space created by removal of dead-bone was quite substantial but thanks to the non-organic material, there would be something to fill this space while the leg was healing again. We were assured that the material would dissolve as the healthy bone grew to bridge the gap. Would it take time? Yes. But it was a very gratifying solution to a situation that might have cost my daughter her leg from the knee down.
Well, today, almost three years after the incident, my daughter is walking with the help of a semi-flexible leg support that looks like a boot of sorts. The doctor has assured us that the support will not be needed after a few more months. She will be just fine and forget all about it long before her 7th birthday. Who says the third world is not developing at all?
