The year was 2009 and I was visiting Nigeria when my sister started to feel unwell.
She had been seen by a doctor already who had diagnosed her with “sub acute appendicitis” and sent her home with some painkillers.
This confused me because even with my limited clinical experience I knew that appendicitis was typically an acute event that requires surgical intervention. Pretty straightforward.
Naturally, her symptoms progressed and she was admitted to the Federal Military Hospital in Ikoyi. I remember receiving a list of items ranging from cotton wool to intravenous antibiotics which we had to buy before my sister could receive treatment. I couldn’t understand how these items (that I could always find lying around in the treatment room at the lone national hospital of the little island where I was a medical student) had to be provided by the patient.
I remember saying to my mother during that episode that I would rather sell pepper than practice medicine in Nigeria. I was to eat my words a few years later when I became the doctor handing out the list we referred to as “admission pack”.
We decided to leave the Military hospital after I noticed even more things I wasn’t comfortable with. Such as the fact that patients had to walk down stairs after receiving general anaesthesia for surgery and the absence of a backup generator.
We moved to Federal Medical Centre where she eventually had the surgery done by the most arrogant surgeon who did not feel the need to address his starving patient when he came for a ward round on her second day post op. The consultant came around with his underlings and he basically talked at them and over us and when I asked him a question he looked at me with such disgust like how dare I have a question about my starving recuperating sister.
Thankfully my sister recovered without incident and was discharged shortly after, however the entire incident left a bitter taste in my mouth and made me even more certain that I would never practice medicine in Nigeria.
But you know what they say about the best laid plans. When my plans to practice in America fell through, I moved back to Nigeria where I practiced for six years.
In that time I worked alongside super heroes who performed life saving procedures at the patients bedside, donated money to pay for their patients treatment, donated their own blood for patients to get life saving blood transfusions, amongst other heroic deeds.
I have also met doctors who don’t show any empathy when dealing with patients, provide care but do not feel the need to educate their patients, carry out unnecessary and sometimes harmful procedures amongst other horrible things. But these “bad eggs” have been much fewer and farther between.
I also had to run from the ward many times, blinded by tears after yet another needless death. Of which there were many.
We once lost a patient because she had fluid in her lungs and the hospital bed wasn’t working and there were no pillows available to prop her up and so she lay there surrounded by a team of doctors, gasping desperately for breath, until she stopped moving.
When I see people complain about doctors in Nigeria, I want to explain that it’s less about the doctors than it is about a non-existent system. The truth is that the Nigerian healthcare sector is just as underfunded, corrupt and useless as any other sector in Nigeria. The only difference is that the impact on life and health is direct and almost instant.
Without a proper system, one where healthcare professionals actually have the required facilities to work and where there are enforceable checks and balances, nothing is going to change.
The people who need healthcare will continue to die while our leaders continue to fly abroad for treatment and our doctors continue to migrate to lands where they have the required facilities to practice modern day medicine.
