NOT MY FAULT

How time flies, it’s been three years now since I left college. If time really heals hurts, I can’t tell, but sure, I don’t feel as sad as I was thirteen years ago. Coming out of the medical school with one of the best results in my set after almost a decade of a very challenging academic sojourn meant so much to me and it was really a great consolation for me.

Though it would have meant much more to me if my parents had attended my valedictory ceremony but of course they couldn’t have. Growing up without our mother wasn’t so difficult for my sister and I aside the mother-daughter relationship we missed, dad was everything to us. We didn’t know her too well, she died when I was five, I still remember he gentle smiles and that thin voice, but at times she looked as frail. Mum was a sicklier a sickle cell anaemia patient.

Dada met mum during a seminar he attended in one of the neighbouring countries to us where mum hailed form. It was at a time she was already contemplating of coming to Nigeria. Aside being the only child, her mother was against her decision to relocating considering her health problem. My parents never had it smooth getting married; dad’s parents were against it, not for any other reason but the fact that mum was a sicklier. This act of his made him become more or less an outcast in his family

That rejection was unfair. Yes, mum was very sickly, her being a sicklier was not her choice anyway. I knew what genotype meant quiet early. Mum was ‘SS’, Dad ‘AA’, so my sister and I are carriers; we are of ‘AS’ genotype.

I took interest in medicine at a tender age. Today, I am a medical doctor and if I have any regret is that Dad is not here to see her daughter’s dream fulfilled. Dad died fourteen years ago. It was the most devastating period of my life. I just gained admission into the University, while my sister was also preparing to go in for music in one of the polytechnics we have in Nigeria, she had always wanted to be an expert in music. She is gifted with a sonorous voice like mum’s.

Dad died of cancer. It came so unannounced. His death came like a flash of lighting, he was a very hardworking gentleman, an engineer by profession, he was in fact a workaholic, so healthy and I cannot remember him ever falling ill all those years. I thought life was so unfair and I was torn apart.

I wasn’t surprised I repeated my first year and my aunt (dad’s only sibling who we were putting up with then) thought I wouldn’t be able to cope studying medicine if I started that bad. But when the heart is depressed at that point in time it would take an extra- ordinary effort and perhaps a divine intervention to succeed and that was what I went for.

I repeated again in my third year, but I still kept on because my mind was made up to become a doctor. During my years in school, I had a glimpse into what could have been responsible for my father sudden death. And it should be a lesson to everyone reading this story. I wonder how many people check their blood pressure regularly from the age of twenty-five in this part of our world which could prevent a disease like if diagnosed early. Dad was never sickly nor was at anytime on admission in the hospital except for just that one that led to his death. My father lived with cancer for several years!

My sister is happily married with a child now and I will soon tie the nuptial knot with a gentleman of the same genotype with me – AS, which ideally means we might have an SS child, but that can not be a barrier to us, medical science has risen to that challenge.

But really should genotype issues deprive one of spending the rest of one’s life with someone one loves and would be happy with if there wasn’t a way round it? Well may be for the sake of the child who might live his or her days in agony.

I believe whatever the negative life has handed one, there are surely few positive ones, celebrate those few like I did, after all without a positive and negative terminal current wouldn’t flow.