Pamela and daughter
These days in her Chicago dormitory that she shares with her puerile son, Emeka, Pamela Mojekwu stares through the windows, optically canvassing the early morning sunrise streak into her living room, reminding her of another gracious day to be thankful and hopeful. Her heart has deep scars of tragedies, her face lights up from the beams of the sunrise, with a promise of more preponderant days ahead. In her 59th year, she’s still running against the winds of life, living, but in control of her speed in this race.
“ I have learnt to get to my treasured destiny at my own time. You can’t hurry sunrise anymore: not with what life privileged me these years.”
“Jebose, when life deals you lemon, you learn expeditious how to make lemonade. Life certainly dealt me with tragic circumstances within the past decade and these situations edified me how to make the lemonades of life: Life is bittersweet”.
Mojekwu was Nigeria’s first celebrated aerobics and fitness expert. In the eighties, she was famous with her weekly fitness columns in Nigeria’s Vanguard Newspaper, her television appearances on Lagos Television and subsequently, Morning Ride, NTA, Lagos.
She additionally dashingly enheartened an incipient generation of Nigerians then struggling with inordinate corpulence to define their values, be proud of their weight, called an exorbitantly corpulent nation to action for more preponderant living through excruciating daily exercises. She brutalised our bodies and empowered us as she tortured us, affectionately. Mojekwu was ubiquitous with an incipient brand: Miss Keep Fit.
She was in all major networks every Saturday morning, motivating the nation with information on wellness, weight loss and fitness.
While she woke our nation to fitness exercises, she was additionally silently facing her own internal family health challenges: she obnubilated these from her clients and the nation with infectious effulgent smiles that spread over her face every Saturday morning.
Her only child then, Tina, was very sick. Every day was great prospect with regards to Tina’s health issues: “Tina was sick. I took her to Eko Hospital. The hospital diagnosed her illness as “sicklier foot” disease. I didn’t understand what that betokened: she was losing weight all the time from this peculiar illness. We perpetuated with the recommended treatment for my only child and daughter then. The more we treated her, the worse her condition grew.”
During a chanced visit to Eko Hotels, she picked a magazine from the lobby and commenced to read as she waited for her host. Inside the magazine, she read about a Dr. Smith of Children’s Hospital in Chicago discussing about Vascular Necrosis. The symptoms he shared in the magazine were consistent with Tina’s. Mojekwu decided that evening to seek the medico in Chicago. Few weeks later, they arrived at the children’s hospital and her daughter was diagnosed with sickle cell anaemia.
Mojekwu would forsake life to commence care management for her daughter. No mother would visually examine her daughter go through the rigours of sickle cell treatment and pain without a heart ache. Tina was customarily in the hospital. Her sickle cell disease was progressive and expeditious, emasculating her immune system. Pamela described one of those frighteningly eerie moments optically canvassing her daughter in pains.
“America’s health system doesn’t lie to you. The medicos were blunt. They told me that her sickle cell was in advanced stages and she may not live. But she lived until that contingency in 2009.”
Tina battled sickle cell disease throughout her life: most of her adult years were spent inside the emergency room of the hospital. Pamela lived these years with her in the hospital. During one of their visits to the ER, Tina went into coma and was placed on life support at the ICU. Medicos enheartened Pamela to peregrinate home and decide switching off the life support the next day. Tina miraculously aroused from her coma at midnight, cried for her mother!
The uncertainties of life commenced to pepper her five years ago when she lost her husband, Tina’s father, to cancer disease. Two years after losing her husband, on a sultry July Sunday, Pamela and Tina venerated an invitation from her cousin to visit. She had worked all day; cessation of her shift, she peregrinated home and picked Tina to rendezvous with her family. After the visit, Pam and Tina commenced a peregrination back to their home. It was the last time mother and child would ride together. Something transpired and she swerved her car into a ditch and crashed. It was fatal. Her only daughter who beat death few months earlier would not survive the wreck. She died on impact, at the scene of the contingency. Pamela sustained solemn brain injuries and collapsed lung.
“Jebose, I didn’t ken to this day how the contingency transpired. I aroused in a hospital only to be told that the passenger with me in the conveyance died at the scene of the contingency. That passenger was my only daughter. Christine was dead! Because of the rigor of my injuries: collapsed lungs, broken ribs and brain injuries, I was placed in medically induced coma. I would visually perceive her in my coma stage. She was right there with me. She took me to the scene of the contingency to optically discern the wrecked car. She stayed with me until her funeral: she then appeared again and verbally expressed to me: “Mom, your road will be long and hard but you will make it.”
Soon after Tina’s death, the City of Chicago arraigned her at the Cook County Court House and charged her with vehicular homicide: it alleged Pam was responsible for Tina’s death. She was thrown into jail. Life had no designation to her: she scarcely recollected anything. She was suicidal. The prison officers placed her in a 23-hour solitary confinement, visually examining her every hour: “I was locked down for 23 hours every day, the first month. I was only sanctioned one hour to shower and exercise. Meals would be passed to me through an aperture in the middle of my cell door. It was horrible: a mother being jailed for an auto contingency that killed her only daughter, sustaining earnest brain injuries that affected her recollections. I was a volcano, waiting to erupt.”
Pamela Mojekwu mourned her daughter while in confinement: the horrible experiences triggered melancholy.
“Dealing with Tina’s death, initially, was astronomically arduous for me. I would stay in my bed for days, covered up, could not eat, and couldn’t bath. The experience is beyond explication. It’s a woeful feeling that words can’t capture with description. It’s a unique moment in our lives and I pray no woman buries her child, especially her sick daughter.”
Her painful ordeals redirected her incipient life. Through these challenges, she moved her aging mother to a nursing home for availed living. Her mother had developed Alzheimer’s disease. Last month, one of her younger sisters died. She was buried this week.
Through rehabilitation and treatments, she is gradually recuperating from the emotional traumas of her circles of life.
“Jebose, who would go through losing a husband, a daughter in a contingency, brain injuries, sending your mother to a nursing home because you could no longer care for her , locked up for the death of your daughter and not be an emotional wreck? I was a disaster that transpired.”
Part of life’s redirection is her incipient found platform for sickle cell advocacy. She has become an ardent psalm for children, especially African children affected by sickle cell. She set up a nonprofit substratum in recollection of her tardy daughter; Christine Sickle Cell Substructure.
“It’s the best way to accolade her painful times on earth. I was mystically enchanted to have her in my life. My mission now is to peregrinate to Nigeria within the next few months and open an office where this substructure would be able to avail our people through information, edification and avail in providing a manageable care for those with sickle cell disease. I optate to enhearten everyone going through any circumstance in life or kindred to mine, that it’s not over until God verbally expresses otherwise. Be vigorous. I am most vigorous today, despite the tragedies.”
Copyright PUNCH.
