Tragic mom home-sick: 'I must make new babies for my loving husband'

It took nearly two years to tell amputee-wife Mrs. Ibiyemi Lawani that her only two children are both dead.

To be sure, her David and Elizabeth aged two years and three months, respectively (at the time of their death), were involved in the same accident that cost her leg.

Now, after more than two years living from specialist hospital, to spiritual home, to psychotherapy medical home, Ibiyemi wants to return 'home.' That is why she had to be informed that her lovely children are long dead, contrary to the persuasive talk that she had been given that her children were being treated in other hospitals.

David Lawani would have been four years old on May 21st, 2013 and his sister Elizabeth would be two years on May 24th, 2013 if she had lived. Their father and tragic husband of Ibiyemi, Oluwaseyi who has lost everything he ever cherished in life except his 'crippled' wife, is literally a ghost – hardly capable of coherent conversation.

The story is not too complex but the aftermath is more multipart than a matrix: one Sunday morning in September 2011, a happy Lawani family of Oluwaseyi, Ibiyemi, David and Elizabeth just left church service, heading home to lunch when tragedy struck.

'Seyi, who had tarried in church to attend to assignments by his pastor, got an SOS that one Mrs. Rabiat Oyenuga, wife (or mistress) of a retired assistant commissioner of police, had run down 'Seyi's entire family with her car.

The 'scene of death' was a spot along Apapa Road in Ebute-Meta area of Lagos Mainland. When Mr. Lawani got to the spot, he found that David was knocked against a broken-down truck in the process of which a jagged, rusty loose metal ripped open the lad's midriff, his insides strewn on the macadam.

Unmercifully, nature also had it that infant Elizabeth, at the time only about three months old and journeying on her mother's back, was similarly flung unto a stationary tricycle, the impact of which resulted in a cracked skull. Mrs. Lawani's right leg was irredeemably shattered.

One bystander commandeered a cab and headed to the Gbagada General Hospital with Ibiyemi's mangled form in tow. A Good Samaritan had rushed David to the Lagos Island General Hospital. While family members raced Elizabeth to a private compound in Ebute-Meta, David was pronounced DoA (dead on arrival); Elizabeth also died shortly after and Ibiyemi was detained in the ICU (intensive care unit).

It has been a long, saddening story. Ibiyemi, a higher national diploma (HND) secretary before the ordeal started, has lived from hospital to hospital, prayer house to another, this physiotherapy centre or the other until she ended up at the Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital (OAUTH), Ile-Ife.

She had been through the FMC, Ayilara Mercy Hospital, Janfang Hospital, and other orthodox and not so modern medical facilities. With multiple fractures, Ibiyemi has gone from gangrenous infections to amputation, to use of prosthesis. What has she not gone through?

Oluwaseyi Lawani, a graduate marketing practitioner at Standard Chartered Bank, has had to abandon paid employment so as to be available to look after his wife, his 'sole purpose for living' Ibiyemi.

At the height of his plight, when he said he had literally exhausted his entire goodwill with family, friends, sympathizers and sundry benefactors, it was KUTH Foundation which on December 5th, 2011 raised N200,000 towards settlement of the first bulk of hospital bills.

Four months later, the Foundation handed in another N150,000 cheque to the distraught husband against the surging medical bills; even as the principal promoter this June wrote yet another N100,000 cheque to further augment the family's fervent yearning for reunion.

Many sad sub-themes of the narrative elicit hot, salty tears. 'Seyi has given up on the court process started against Mrs. Oyenuga by human rights lawyers, because the lawyers seem not to attach any premium to the matter anymore. 'In Nigeria, the Law is dead,' he says.

His wife demands to be taken off the teaching hospital bed at Ile-Ife so that she could come home to Lagos and, wait for it, re-start her life by replacing her husband's lost children.

She says the only cure for her current state of physical and mental health is to be made pregnant by 'my most caring husband' prosthesis or not.

But, 'Seyi Lawani has not the faintest idea how to raise the more than N400,000 needed to secure his wife's release from hospital. When he visited KUTH offices again mid-May, 2013 one word described his entire mien: dejection.