The Day of Death
Today, I am at Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) and my enthusiasm has become little, like the tiniest baby bump I have ever seen.
There is a sharp stench hovering over my head despite the distant conversations drumming in my ears.
It is the smell of mediocrity and repressed dreams.
Repressed because it feels like there was a time there was an imminent bubble in their hearts, like the thick lather of morning fresh soap.
But over time, it evanesced into acceptance and false contentment.
I am here peeping through the Central sterile service department window to ask for someone and the consciousness that this smell may enter my nostrils fills me with so much dread.
Almost like a contagious disease.
An elderly woman with a kind face and thin fingers looks at me and I genuflect and bow at the same time to exude a confused courtesy.
I tell her why I am here and she nods her head and tells me to wait with a slow wave.
She removes her glasses and wears them again, almost like an aimless ritual.
I walk in and sit down.
The ceiling fan is rotating with a squeaky sound which eventually becomes a good distraction for me because I glance at it at intervals as if willing for it to fall.
The conversations around me revolve around the annoying repetitive questions that patients ask, the irony of distance learning, and something about the new stock of sterile papers interrupted by loud greetings in passing.
The place is well ventilated but the air circulating my lungs is not enough because I do not feel comfortable.
‘What’s your name?’ The kind woman holds my gaze, with her soft eyes hidden behind her transparent glasses
‘La.. Omolabake’ I stutter while trying to decide if my name is Labake or Omolabake.
‘Your surname?’ She continues, her stare unflinching.
‘Adejumo’ I say immediately.
‘From where?’ Her hands are busy folding white napkins but her eyes are trained in my direction.
‘Lagos ma’ I nod again in needless curtsy.
‘You’re very pretty’ Her lips stretch into a knowing smile that silences the squeaky sound of the ceiling fan immediately.
‘Thank you ma’ I smile back, suddenly wishing that I could hug her but I nod again instead, wondering If my neck muscles are now slack or if anxiety always announces its presence in this exaggerated manner.
I adjust my chair for no reason, and smile at my phone, deliberately avoiding eye contact of other workers in their faded blue scrubs.
In a corner of this fairly spacious room, there is a floor-standing air conditioner that looks like it has never been turned on and a small square wall clock that looks hidden and out of place.
Some chairs are directly placed in front of tables but they still look scattered.
Some tiles are shaky while the ones at the centre, near my feet are broken— a photographic evidence of our collective hearts here.
I watch the elderly woman walk in her thin wiry frame.
Her gait is graceful. Every step is with caution like a well-thought-out decision.
She looks like she has never been in a hurry.
The power goes out and it draws a loud groan from the room and a gasp from my lips.
The girl in front of me has a surgical net on.
On the back of her blue T-shirt is written ‘hygiene control’ but she is barefoot.
Her legs are firm, gliding against the floor, on the tiles, on the shaky and broken tiles.
The irony forces me to hold back laughter and it strikes me how humour has to be found sometimes.
Other times, it finds you. Like this one.
The woman beside me is stuck in the monotony of her task.
She is smiling as she is folding the napkins and I know that the drudgery of that task cannot be the source of her nascent joy. In this heat?
Then I notice that her ears are plugged in.
It strikes me how she escapes this boredom by watching a movie in tandem.
She may not have an idea but she is practising Temptation bundling which James Clear describes in Atomic Habits that works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
There is a man whose left eye is plastered.
He looks dishevelled as he peeps through the window to buy another plaster.
He has to pay first at the pay point but he doesn’t know where it is.
The women at the window describe it repeatedly and it takes him a long while to understand what they are saying.
It reminds me of their earlier indignation about patients’ repetitive questions.
It suddenly becomes obvious to me that this is a day in their life.
This is not the typical fancy vlog on my TikTok for-you-page that claims to take people virtually on a fun journey to Mexico, to get their hair done, try out a new restaurant, try out new fashion items or go on a blind date.
This one has nothing to do with aesthetics.
The aesthetic here is the numbed pain.
The art here is the squeaky fan piercing my ears and perhaps the broken tiles.
This is a day in their life moving incessantly around a cubicle to the extent that it disarms every form of claustrophobia that could have been present.
The woman I need to see comes out of her office and looks at me.
After asking for my name, she says to me, as if in a trance “There is no time to rest. The only time to rest is when we die’’.
She ends the last sentence in a high inflection and I know it means that I must agree.
I nod, as usual.
Immediately, there is an accidental mirroring of our gestures because the power comes on and we both thank God aloud.
The shared intimacy makes me smile.
I want to get her last line off my head because the stench reappears filling my nostrils.
I want to unsee the dishevelled one-eyed man trying to figure out where the pay point is because he needs the plaster urgently.
The last thing that lingers in my head is the fact that they need to fix the tiles because it is dangerous, even though they all look unbothered.
Perhaps it is my constant pull towards safety that has triggered me now.
Or maybe it is a reminder of death that has put me on my toes.
Even as I close the door to leave, the door to these memories has sprung open, persisting in my cerebral cave.
I know I can never get rid of them.
This is crazily descriptive!! I enjoyed it🥹❤️
Very Nice!