Thorn in my side

“  "She’s been complaining about side pain all week and tossing and turning in bed.”

My older sister Ayodele blabbed to our mum, Theodora as we sat in the cluttered living room chatting. My mum looked at me in a concerned way.

   “Which side?” I went silent; too scared to speak. “Right or left?” I only had two.

   “Where’s the pain? Omotayo?” My mum inquired raising her voice as she addressed me by my house name. I knew I was in trouble whenever mother called me by my full West African name and not the one used for school- Bridgette. Fear however engulfed me; my brain was closing in between its barriers- my ears.

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I knew I was seriously ill. The piercing sensation in my right side felt like a needle was lodged in my intestines. My whole stomach must be lined with the chillies my mum spiced Cassava leaves and Jollof Rice with. I was paralysed by dread though; I had a pathological fear of needles and hospitals which kept me from confessing to my mum that my right side had felt for weeks like the gardener was running a rake over it.

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Naturally boisterous, I found my voice eventually and squeaked, “I’m fine mummy. I’m okay.” Lies rolled of my tongue like my dad’s Cuban cigars. The last thing I wanted was my mum to start laying her hands on my flaming stomach reciting the Lord’s Prayer so God would heal me. She was raised to take everything to the Lord in prayer,  guided by hymns we sang at St Augustine’s Church, Freetown. Vexed, my mum looked at me through narrowed eyes, enveloped by huge eyelids resembling folds of puppy skin. She had her mum-radar up and knew I was lying. My eighteen-year-old sister Ayodele told fibs about not having a boyfriend but even by her standards the report of me been too poorly to sleep at night was farfetched.

   “She was limping on the way to Youth club along the cut-through,” Ayodele continued now picking up a pitch and speaking with verbal diarrhoea.

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My other sister twenty-year old Bamidele who had picked that precise moment to walk into our narrow living room, stopped in her tracks, her rabbit- like ears pricking, listening in, ready to interject with her bit of juicy family gossip. Disappointingly for her perhaps, I went mute. In the deadly silence that ensued the realisation dawned on me that the game was up: my family had seen through my pretence and knew from the intense pain causing me to shudder involuntarily that I needed to be taken to the only hospital in Sierra Leone in 1990, equipped to give an emergency consultation.

“Ring your dad and ask him to come home.”

My mum Theodora barked at no-one in particular in our language. We lived in one of those old 1960s colonial houses, so our house was connected up by cables to telephone poles to the archaic Hill Station Telephone Exchange.

Garrulous Ayodele took it upon herself  to dash to where the grey rotary telephone sat - pride of place on an overdecorated coffee day adorned by a white lace table mat - grabbed its handset attached to the base by an almost out-of-shape spiral cord and dialled my dad, Pa Thompson-Renner’s government office, chubby fingers pushing the dial all the way round the centre disc as if that would bring dad home sooner at rush hour, with that fuel scarcity and roads riddled with potholes.

 I tried listening in but was distracted by the inferno in my right side; our mum’s charcoal fire must have engulfed my entire stomach. My head was spinning from searing pain as a tightening in my side was the last thing I remembered before collapsing on our bare, wooden living room floor.

                                                                 *

            When I came round, there was greenish vomit on the single bed with the most uncomfortable mattress on which my undernourished  five foot two inches frame seemed to be laying, prone. Female voices sounded as if they were coming through the tribal horn in the living room cabinet at home. Someone was being violently sick- me, and a woman’s rhythmic voice was explaining in Pidgin with large hands convoluting around her bespectacled face, they had no utensils for patients to throw up into by their bedside. Conscious of making a mess, which sat me up like a lightning bolt had struck me. Resting my elbows on springs where the mattress foam had worn out living gaps concealed under the bedsheet, I suddenly took in my surroundings, realising I was in the dreaded *Connaught hospital, having probably been admitted there when I passed out.

The voice belonged to a plump nurse now perched on the edge of my already too-tight bed-  how did her bottom even fit? She kept gesticulating with chunky arms protruding from her stained, off-white uniform sleeves at my agitated mum and sisters who were placed strategically in the position of foot soldiers, beside the tattered floral curtains meant to cordon off other bedspaces in the shared ward. But I remember I could clearly see another patient, looking heavily pregnant, laying with legs sprawled out ungraciously on another miniscule bed with a rusty metal frame, writhing in what appeared to be absolute agony. I scanned the dirty ward from the cobweb clad flickering overhead lights to the flooring around my bed, the sharp-looking ends of broken clay tiles jagged my drowsy brain into action.

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            “I’m going to die here Mum.” I must have muttered, because she stared right through my son, gulped down something which must have been fear and coaxed, “You’d be fine Omo, soon as the surgeon gets that inflamed appendix out.”

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Her words sent my brain into overdrive, thoughts ruminating. I had heard about *Connaught hospital with its unsanitary conditions and constant power cuts and had the gut feeling that I was probably going to be exterminated in a catalogue of medical errors on the operation table. I had never been hospitalised before, inconceivable, seeing I was definitely an over-active teenager who had climbed all the fruit trees in our huge backyard, while driven by a penchant for the guava fruit, the seeds of which had probably inflamed my appendix. I would squander the whole fruit pips and all after school when ravishing hunger prevented me from waiting until our housekeeper Kadiatu finished preparing lunch on the charcoal stove.

I did not care what had caused the infection. I just knew my life was going to end at sixteen years of age- or my hypochondriacal brain was telling me so.

 “Surgeon? I’m going to have an operation, right?”

This time I fainted again, happily letting my body plummet into its vomit.

By Bridgette James

• = Name changed