The Heart of Mercy: A Literary Therapy

By ISAAC EZENWA UMELO

Isaac Umelo is a 70year old Electrical Engineer, a former staff of Unilever and an Alumni of Haggai Institute Singapore. He started writing in High School contributing articles to Christian magazines and national newspapers. He has written four novels including THEY HAVE NO BIRTHDAY, a critique of societal attitude to domestic servants.
The author was a chapter President of the Full Gospel Business Mens Fellowship International in Lagos where he led the Prison Welfare committee to impact on Prison conditions. He is a Deacon of The Redeemed Evangelical Mission Lagos and a Co-Author of the Gratitude Book Project 2013: A Celebration of 365 days of Gratitude, a NY Best seller edited by Dona Kozik.
Isaac and his wife Ngozi have four boys Obi, Kelechi, Tochukwu, and Chichi; two girls Ihuoma and Udochi. The couple lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Feb 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781499093292

ISAAC EZENWA UMELO

Isaac Umelo is a 70year old Electrical Engineer, a former staff of Unilever and an Alumni of Haggai Institute Singapore. He started writing in High School contributing articles to Christian magazines and national newspapers. He has written four novels. The author was a chapter President of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International in Lagos where he led the Prison Welfare committee to impact on Prison conditions. He is a Deacon of The Redeemed Evangelical Mission Lagos and a Co-Author of the “Gratitude Book Project 2013: A Celebration of 365 days of Gratitude,” a NY Best seller edited by Dona Kozik. Isaac Umelo is a father of 6.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Isaac Ezenwa Umelo.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4990-9330-8

                eBook           978-1-4990-9329-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 02/02/2015

Xlibris

0-800-056-3182

www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

684884

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Chapter 1 IGBOBI WARD 1

Chapter 2 LET US PRAY

Chapter 3 JESSE

Chapter 4 EXPO ’98

Chapter 5 USHE

Chapter 6 NURSES ALSO CRY

Chapter 7 THE PHYSIO-LADY

Chapter 8 MERRY CHRISTMAS IN WARD 1

Chapter 9 THE SWAN SONG

DEDICATION

Dedicated to the Medical team at The Orthopaedic Hospital Igbobi; to my fellow patients who by a positive attitude turned a grave situation into one of camaraderie and thereby hastened healing. Many of you are still cherished family friends today. It was great to have been your pastor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I appreciate the Almighty God who saw me through sensitive spinal surgery sessions in Nigeria and India, and returned me wholesome to my family.

I appreciate my wife of 39years, Ngozi and children Obinna, Ihuoma, Kelechi, Chichi, Tochukwu and Udochi. They were my legs when there was no life in mine. Tochukwu stood with me in the painful stay in India; Ihuoma and Kelechi kept my vision for writing alive. God is blessing them.

CHAPTER 1

IGBOBI WARD 1

"Alejo o daaro!’ The lady in green gown pulled her trolley along the gangway as she shouted the announcement. When she got to the end of the ward, she turned back still making the important broadcast this time with more firmness and obvious threat to carry out her order. She was a determined lady, thick set, dark in complexion and about fifty years of age. From the way she spoke or rather, shouted, it was obvious that she was used to giving orders and receiving prompt compliance. She looked like the type that brooked no nonsense from the visitors.

Alejo o daaro is a Yoruba expression for announcing the end of the daily visiting hours at Ward 1 of the National Orthopedic Hospital in Igbobi (NOHI). Literally, it means ‘Visitors goodbye, your welcome is over.’

The 4.30 to 6.00pm visiting time was often observed more in breach. Many ward attendants (as the green-shirted ladies were also called) were known to indulge the visitors, taking light view of the breach especially in cases of new patients and visiting spouses who needed to be weaned into the long and painful time it took to be healed at the Orthopedic place, but not Mrs. Shode.

Alejo! she would shout shaking her head, "I say o daaro; six o’ clock don nack. Time to go." The object of her address was a well-dressed gentleman who had just rushed in to see his hospitalized colleague. The man looked at her with a wooer’s smile:

Madam it’s okay, he pleaded, please just one minute, I have a message…

I say go! the madam shouted. She then left the gentleman to address a young lady sitting by her wounded husband. The wounded man had been in the Ward for months. Both he and the wife knew well the antics of Mrs. Shode.

Madam Sho, the man on the bed called jovially.

Ah, no ‘madam Sho’ me. Abi you know the rules. Alejo must go.

And so the bantering continued. Many of the visitors took an early hint and vacated the hospital. Many thought that their relations might suffer from any obstinacy they exhibit. By 7pm only a handful of visitors remained. By then madam Shode had served her dinner knowing fully well she could never win them all, all the time.

On one of the beds, in the middle cubicle, close to the nurses’ duty room, a young man was regaining consciousness from the effect of anesthetics. He was wheeled from the operating theatre three hours earlier. He was completing his first week in the hospital having started his experience from the casualty ward. He knew he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Prior to this time, the young man left his parent’s home at Ibadan 120 km from Lagos. He went there to put finishing touches to his wedding plans billed to hold in that city in three weeks time. Aged 28, and a banker, his program at Ibadan included the presentation of his new Honda Accord car to his father and the elders of the compound for their blessing. His future wife stayed back in Lagos to see to the cake making, dressmaking and the bits and pieces that go into putting together a high society wedding.

The wedding would take place in Ibadan to honour the parents, but a night party was billed to hold at their residence in Lagos. To welcome her husband home, the young lady cooked a simple delicacy of pounded yam and Okro Soup.

Ayo had driven cars since he was sixteen. His father often preferred him on the wheels to his official drivers and elder brothers. A few weeks to his wedding was certainly no time for reckless speeding. He never tasted alcohol. Yet an hour after he left Ibadan, his car careered out of the express road, bouncing at the road shoulders and ended up with four tires facing up as if in obeisance to some heavenly deity.

Ayo was picked up unconscious by the members of the Federal Road Safety Corps. They pulled his legs from the wreckage by cutting open what remained of the driver’s door. They bandaged his bleeding limbs inside the ambulance and drove him to the orthopedic hospital Igbobi. He was lucky; the ambulance operators dropped him on a vacant stretcher.

Men and women lay all over the blood stained floor. Relations of the wounded hung around the hall with hands on their chins beckoning for attention from the few medics on duty. Cries of agony mixed with shouts of command and hooting from ambulances filled the air.

But Ayo survived the commotion, thanks to the first aid he received from the Road Safety team. Four hours after his arrival, he received attention from one of the specialist accident doctors. His condition was stabilized and with the intervention of his office he was transferred to the more comfortable WARD 1 there to await surgery and other medication.

Ayo’s bed in the middle cubicle of WARD 1 was close to the Nurses duty room, but it didn’t guarantee any special attention. In the middle of the night, he cried out for help to empty his bladder.Nurse! Nurse. Nurse! Nurse! He called even as He pressed the call bell but there was no nurse in sight. He knew it would be some time before he got attention. Only two nurses attended to the twenty odd patients in the three cubicles of Ward 1 and the private rooms. For all he knew, they were at that moment dressing wounds inside a screened bed. He took a long breath and relapsed into sleep. His bursting bladder would have to wait.

In the first cubicle of the ward, the six patients