•’I’ve accepted my fate, but the pains won’t go’
Usually, on his birthday, his home is a beehive, with family members and friends coming to rejoice with him.
But this December 12 was different. Kaseem Ayinla, 64, was not in a celebration mood because of his condition.
He looked at his amputated right leg on his wheel chair in front of his Ogunlesi Street, Palmgrove, Lagos home and shook his head. A few sympathisers, mostly his tenants, watched as he struggled to suppress his emotion. Breaking his silence after a deep sigh, he cleared his throat, saying: “Al-hamdu-lillahi (To Allah be the glory).
“I can’t but accept my fate, but I don’t know what I have done to deserve this; and the pains have refused to go,” he said.
Ayinla, popularly addressed as Oluaye by admirers, is the younger brother of former Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Jubril Ayinla.
How did it happen? He recalled that it happened shortly after last year’s Eid-il-Kabir celebration. Ayinla said his first daughter, Bidemi, who was on admission at a Lagos hospital, died from shock minutes after his leg was amputated at the National Orthopaedic Hospital, Igbobi (NOHI) in Yaba, Lagos Mainland.
He said: “Everyone around me knows that sickness is alien to me. The day this trouble began, it was like a bad dream. About 5pm, I took a stroll to a friend’s shop just a stone’s throw to my home to take a bottle of drink. Before settling down there, I headed for the toilet to ease myself. To my dismay, my legs suddenly went stiff and lifeless. I could not move the legs. All I could ask myself was: ‘what is this?’ I had to wait for whoever would come there to urinate. Not quite five minutes later, a man came around and I pleaded with him to assist me. He was the one that promptly alerted others who came to carry me home.”
After sometime, he regained the use of his left leg, but the right “unbearable pains.” “It was as if the bones in the leg were being smashed by an invisible hammer,” he said.
From then, he became a regular caller at the NOHI, the Navy Hospital and the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja in his search hospitals for treatment.
NOHI eventually became his second home. “I spent weeks there; I lost count of how many patients gave up the ghost while I was there, which is why I feel I have cause to thank Allah for this gift of life. Before I was rushed there, I was sitting in front of my house when strangely, my right foot dropped off. As one of my children was packing it inside a poly bag, maggots were dropping from the rotting portion. Like everyone around me, I was alarmed. So, my journey to Igbobi (NOHI) began,” he said.
He went on: “If I had thought that I had a brother in Vice Admiral (Jubril), I knew better that I have a father in him. He is a rare one that any family would pray fervently to have. When he was not with me at my sickbed, he is on phone asking for my condition. He made sure I lacked nothing throughout my dark moments. Ah …… (Virtually lost in spontaneous effusive prayers). He rushed in from abroad, met with the doctors around and dropped more than the money I would need pending when he would return. He did not leave without assuring me that Allah was with me.”
Ayinla said his doctor cracked jokes with him to get his back off the surgery.
“I was made to fix my gaze on a moving object on an electronic board in my front after giving me some injections minutes earlier. I only got to know that I had lost my right leg some minutes later when the pains began. It was traumatic,” Kazeem said.
While he was awaiting surgery, the late Bidemi was in pains in another hospital. A relation, who got wind of her father’s predicament, broke the news of his amputated leg to her during a visit her.
“Hearing that his father’s leg had been amputated, Bidemi was said to have screamed on her sickbed and that was how she died instantly. But the news of her death was not broken to me until later on my birthday – December 12, last year,” Kazeem said, explaining: “I was at home here when my brother (Jubril) came with all sorts of gifts as it was my birthday. Some of my children and relations were around too. Shortly after settling down, my brother moved closer and held me by my shoulder. I was moved by the display of brotherly love. He reminded me that I was no longer a kid and that at my age and life experience, nothing should move me badly. So, he dropped the bombshell: ‘Take heart and be a man; Bidemi is no more!’ I was shattered. I wept like a baby. It was a day I would never forget in my life.”
AVM Ayinla then got him a wheel-chair to aid his movements in his compound. Not long after, the ex-naval officer returned from abroad with a motorized wheel-chair which, according to Kazeem, costs between N1.5million and N2million. With the wheelchair, he can visit friends in the neighbourhood with ease.
Weeks after, another a medical test revealed that the problem in his amputated right leg was about affecting the other. Then, he had to undergo another surgery on his stomach.
Pulling off his shirt to show the reporter the affected part of his stomach, Kazeem said: “You can see the stitched portion. It was done in Abuja. My brother flew in experts from abroad to do it. It cost him about N5million. You can only join me in daily prayers for him (Jubril); he is my human saviour. Even after the surgeries, he has been taking adequate care of my upkeep and that of his other siblings among others in and outside the family.”
On Saturday, the reporter saw him cruising around in his motorised wheel-chair. He was in a flowing agbada with cap to match. He told the reporter: “What has happened has happened; we have to move on with Allah behind us.”
After a exchange of pleasantries, he rode off, beaming with smiles.
