Saw a patient today with a hemoglobin of 1.9 g/dL. For context, a level that low is almost incompatible with normal consciousness, but she walked right into the clinic on her own feet.
For three long years, she lived with crushing weakness and since last 6 months breathlessness from just walking across a room. Why didn’t she get help sooner? At first, it was because the kids had crucial school exams and later her husband was reluctant to deal with the hassle of a hospital admission.
Her health was treated as a background inconvenience.
When we dug deeper, it got worse. A year ago, her Hb was 6.4 g/dL. A doctor explicitly told them she needed immediate admission. The family refused, walked out with a basic strip of iron tablets, she took them for two weeks, forgot about them, and nobody in the house ever bothered to check on her or remind her.
She didn't even come to the hospital today because of the air hunger. She came because her periods had completely stopped for months. Her body was so profoundly starved of iron and oxygen that it literally shut down her reproductive axis just to divert what little blood she had left to her heart and brain.
It’s completely heartbreaking. A woman will literally bleed her body dry, gasp for air for years and keep working silently, only to be brought to a doctor when her normal functioning stops.
Please check on the women in your homes. Stop letting them normalize chronic exhaustion.
Welcome to practicing medicine in Nigeria where becoming a doctor is the easy part.
A medical student once told me he is lacking motivation, I told him he hasn't seen anything yet.
You finish med school, swear the oath, and then begin the real nightmare. The first headache is finding a house job in a country that somehow has a doctor shortage AND no space for doctors at the same time.
If you try to explain this country, you wee just run mad. Then when you finally get one, your salary arrives like a rare celestial event, unpredictable, mysterious, and never on time.
You’re understaffed, overworked, and underpaid, managing 40 patients with God abeg, paracetamol, and faith because the hospital has no monitors, no oxygen, and NEPA is playing hide and seek again.
But don’t worry, if anything goes wrong, it’s your fault because you are the doctor. Nobody cares about the system held together by vibes and prayers.
After housejob, you are promoted to level 2 of shege.
NYSC posts you to a village general hospital or military hospital where the pharmacy is empty, the lab is decorative, and you’re the consultant, registrar, and house officer all in one. Improvisational medicine becomes your new specialty.
You will learn that a nail in the wall serves as perfect drip stand and the examination couch with stoods can actually work as improvised theater table.
Then God help you that you don't Japa and you enter residency. You will expect training but get inducted into a survival game instead. Toxic seniors everywhere who will themselves be complaining of toxic seniors? 36-hour calls will be your daily bread?
You'll wonder whether you're in training or an abuse camp to be stress-tested.
Meanwhile, patients arrive late because healthcare is pay out of pocket. And to be honest can you even afford 300k for emergency ex-lap? Your patients have tried herbs, prayers, and Chatgpt before coming and now they want a miracle. If it works, thank God. If it doesn’t, doctor is wicked.
Equipment? Let's not go there.
ICU beds? 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Security? They still beat your colleague last week and na only God save you.
And when your colleagues start japa-ing. The workload doubles and your HOD doesn't care. If you complain, he'll say he trained in Sokoto where he was the only one attending to 100 patients for 3 months.
The system worsens but no one cares. You consider your life choices at 3am on call while manually ventilating a patient because the machine isn’t working.
And through it all, the system remains underfunded, mismanaged, and somehow your patients keep blaming the doctor.
But yes, please tell us again how doctors are the problem.
Let’s be clear about something that society likes to dance around:
When a teenager develops a crush on you, it is not a compliment to your status, your looks, or your "game." It is a test of your integrity, one that far too many adults are failing.
That child is not looking for a partner; they are looking for validation, often mimicking what they see on screens, completely unaware of the power dynamics they are walking into. They are naive, but you are not.
Your job as the adult in the room isn’t to "play along" because it strokes your ego or use the loophole of "well, they made the first move." Your moral obligation is to be the hard boundary that they don’t have the wisdom to set for themselves yet.
Treat them like a younger sibling. Ignore the advances. Shut it down. Because 10 years from now, when the confusion of puberty fades, that person will look back at you.
Do you want them to remember a safe adult who protected them from their own foolishness? Or do you want to be the villain in their therapy session who took advantage of a child who didn’t know any better?
Let’s do a quick check here please.
If you are a Nigerian reading this tweet and you have never received any cash transfer from these evil lying parasites in government, please kindly retweet this.
I want us to show something. Thank you.
It was in early 2019, as a Corper doctor in Adamawa. On that fateful day, I came to work as usually, without knowing what fate had in store.
At around 1pm, I could hear people wailing outside the hospital. I rushed out of the clinic like everyone else.
A crowd had gathered in front of the emergency unit. There were about 7 people lying on the floor with various degrees of injury. My eyes fell on a middle-aged woman, maybe around 40 years of age, she was leaning against the wall, while sitting on the floor. Around her was a pull of blood, like an opened tap.
I rushed towards her, with 2 non-clinical staff. Swiftly, we tore her clothes open. The site that greeted me left my mouth opened in shock. She had sustained pelvic fracture. I could see a gape just above her pubis, with a sharp pointed bone sticking out. The blood was coming from a major vessel in her pelvis. She needed immediate pelvic surgery, which we could not offer. I packed her up with a lot of pad and repaired some cuts. We moved her into the ward. But I knew we've not done anything for her. She bleed out within an hour. But her 5 year old daughter survived without a scratch.
As the commotion was ongoing, a Toyota Hilux arrived with people Lying at the back like firewood. They were partly covered with leaves, signifying they died on the scene of the accident. I saw the boot of a fellow Corp member sticking out as well, I froze in fear.
A young dark lady, who was posted to Imo State, but relocated back to Gombe state after the orientation camp. On her way to Gombe, just after Mayo Belwa, their car veered off the road and hugged a concrete electric pole. Her journey ended on the spot.
I snapped her passport issued in camp and posted online. Within 2 hours, the NYSC coordinators made contact from Jimeta. It was a long day
I could still remember a very hefty man, more like a trader with bundle of money stashed in his Babariga, dead. I don't know what became of the money.
The following morning, we were yet to recover from yesterday's shock and exhaustion. At 9am, chaos erupted again in the hospital.
An 18-seater bus, Lagos bound, had just left Jimeta park. From Jimeta to Mayo Belwa is roughly 50 minutes. He collided with an oncoming car. My God, I've never seen so many broken legs at once in my life.
We worked like people on substances.
People were laid at the hospital corridors, with drips hanging from the roof because we ran out of drip stand.
For the critically-injured patients, there was nothing anyone could do for them (triage). We focused on those that had a chance of survival.
For many hours, we worked. I was like a man under a spell. Adrenaline was flowing like a river in my veins.
After working for hours to bring calm, I checked the time, it was evening.
I was too numb to utter a word, too devastated to remember food, and too scared to sleep, cos once I close my eyes, all I could see was broken limbs, and blood and dead travelers, and the woman that bled to death in the ward.
Two mass casualties in less than 24hours, left me feeling like this.