The following week or so, people started receiving texts of employment. Jesu!

I charged my phone well, maybe the low battery wasn’t making texts enter. I put the phone in and out of airplane mode, I removed my phone sim and rubbed it with engine oil for better reception. Baba! It was like black magic, useless!! 

Wow! So my connect has failed me?! Haa!! Wow!! Damn!! Damn!!! The thing was painful, my first dose of broken promise, my Prof-Prof. My first dose of disappointment, my 5k form, my Uber money!! Why I no just enter Danfo that time?! I even wore tie to the bloody exam ooo!!! Damn! But I am a sharp guy, I am a man, I cannot allow small things like this break me down, I get up and push. So that was what I did, I….I….. I pushed!  Na lie, e pain me, I no go form hard guy, I nearly cry. The thing pepper my soul.

But the Yorubas have a saying, Adaniloro fagbara koni, which roughly translates to saying, he who disappoints one teaches one to be resourceful. So I applied elsewhere.

Then there was HSC, the hustle and bustle, the time wasting, then finally the exam that also yielded no fruit. HSC was actually more fraudulent than LAUSTH. We first wrote the exam in halls that were so cramped with about eight of us on a table. Fam! I don’t spy in exams, but when you have eight people sharing one small table, your brain gets confused as to whether you’re actually writing an exam or just taking a quiz. I didn’t even have to turn my head, everyone could see everyone’s paper, it was appalling, I’d look at my neighbors sheets and start judging them instinctively and reflexively, in my mind I’d be like “Haa! See Olodo, he shaded B! This one must not touch my relative oo!”, in fact we were so jampacked on the table, I could see my neighbors’ sheets better than mine. If you got carried away, you could even mistake your neighbor’s sheet for yours and start helping him to shade

I didn’t receive a text after that written exam, meaning I didn’t advance to the next stage of interviews. I forgot about it, I thought I just wasn’t a smart enough doctor for the exams.

Only for me to get called me on the day of interview by my friends at the venue. They themselves didn’t receive a text, but they planned to gatecrash the interview and hustle their way through, when they made a startling discovery. Apparently, a bunch of us had passed the written exams and were eligible for the next stage of interviews, but they had failed to send us the text message informing us. We had mysteriously vanished from the list of interviewees.

Yes, you heard that right. They selected who to text.

When those that gatecrashed the interview went to management and investigated sha, they found the full list and started calling us that same afternoon to start running to the Island for interview. Me that I was enjoying the sweet sleep of the Unemployed when the call came in. I just told them to leave me alone abeg, I cannot come and go and die. I was also uninterested in working for an organization that would remove me from list of interviewees when I had actually passed their exams. It meant they didn’t want me either ways, I’d just be giving them another chance to play me wayo again.

HSC was indirectly telling us “Una no get Connect!”. But lest you get the wrong idea about these hospitals, they were not solely working on just connect, in the exams that they held, if anyone really did exceedingly well, connect or not, they actually did select them, I’ll be sincere about that. They selected the smartest people on the sheets, the outliers, the rest of we mere mortals just needed some extra help to make the cut.

As if that rejection wasn’t bad enough, when the employed house officers resumed work at HSC they found the application forms of all of us that were rejected and took a picture of it and uploaded it to our class groups, the bloody HSC people couldn’t even burn it, they just threw all out details inside hot sun. There were our forms, with our names printed on it boldly, the stack of our details laid there openly, ontop a heap of rubbish at their garbage centre. Boys were laughing at the depth of our condition, even we sef.

That was when it began to dawn on me say “O boy! E be like say you go tey for here oo!!”, the sour taste of unemployment was getting heavy on my lips. Account don dey dry. Person no fit party, guy just be house doctor, not house officer oo! I said house doctor, the worst specialty of medicine, slightly above house boy, a house boy with a medical degree. You sweep the house with a stethoscope deftly placed across your neck and hot tears in your eyes while you sing “Akanchawa!”

Three months, four months, five months?! Me that I was already planning how I’d drive to Abakaliki (a rural town or something like that in a faraway part of Nigeria)  or somewhere and submit my application letter in one rural hospital. I was actually ready to do something that drastic. I cannot come and die ontop petty Lagos Politics. 

Then a few guys in the set decided to volunteer in LUTH Accident and Emergency, mainly out of joblessness. And I had also signed up, the only dental personnel that had done so. It had given me a few weeks of work to take my mind off my unemployment status. I learnt a few things in my short duration there.

My first day in A and E, I was assessing patients in the wards and the mother of a young boy who was being managed for RTA injuries (Road Traffic Accident) saw me and started shouting “Doctor, my son just stopped breathing, my son just stopped breathing and moving, help me!”

I quickly glanced at the boy and truly he had stopped moving, he just stared wide-eyed up at the ceiling like he was cut from marble or something, he was about sixteen or seventeen years, tall and lean, he had been hit by a commercial bus, a Danfo, and had fractured a few bones. Mind you, at this point, I wasn’t employed by LUTH oo, I was just a volunteer, that meant if any patient dies under my influence, I can lose the medical license I’ve not even had a chance to collect. I told the hysteric mother, “I’ll be right back!”

I quickly ran off to the original doctor in charge, cos we all know at the point I was merely a mannequin doctor.

“My Chief!”, I cried to her, “The RTA patient has stopped breathing!!”“He has what?”, she said as she rushed past me to attend to the dying boy, myself following quickly behind.

When she got to his bedside, she took one look  at him as he stared wide-eyed and motionless at the ceiling, and she called out his name as she was bringing down her stethoscope to his chest.

You won’t believe this fucking guy blinked. I swear, he blinked and just turned to her with a smile on his face. I was confused and livid. And then she, the doctor looked at me. And I felt so foolish ontop.

“But you said he stopped breathing?”

“Well, ma! He actually stopped breathing!”, I said in futile defence

“Did you check? Did you even check his pulse? Did you do a sternal rub? Did you….”, she proceeded to list all the things I could have done but didn’t do, while I stared there looking at the silly boy and the mother that was now cradling him as if he actually died and was resurrected. Hysterical and overly-dramatic mother and child that want to end my career.

In a few weeks, my volunteering session was over. And I was back to the streets of unemployment.

I began to fear, not too much though, but just enough to know that I needed to act fast. I was already 6 months at home, poor and useless. All I did all day was draw, read and workout. Good use of my time actually, but the financial downsides were staggering. I needed to be employed. And I needed to be employed fast, anywhere, anyhow. At that point, even if Sambisa forest (the headquarters of Boko Haram militants) had offered me a position, I’d have crawled into the battlefield with my ward coat. 

Then it happened one afternoon, LUTH started sending texts to boys. Boys that were raising shoulder for LUTH before, see them licking the feet of LUTH now. When everyone has rejected you, that person you were forming for starts to look like Agbani Darego (one-time Nigerian Miss World). Mai guy! Me myself I began praying for the LUTH, biko, let them text me. Omo! I no see text oo!!

But alas, I didn’t have to worry. A few days after others get their text, my friend, Deolu, went to check and my name was on the LUTH list. LUTH, the land that we were hoping to forsake, now looked like the land of seventy two virgins. Sweet and pure! 

It wasn’t too difficult, we got the coats and bam! We were LUTH staff. The distinction between what we once were and what we now were, was all at once subtle and mind-boggling at the same damn time.

I began with surgery. Three months of hectic work with no pay. Still feeding off the crumbs that fell off my father’s table. Now it was 8 to 4, with patients literally under my care. I remember all of them, every last one, from the one that came in on New Year’s Day with a hundred machete cuts to his face, to the mama that was abandoned by her family due to her cancerous mass. Surgery is a lovely place. As a student, it was always full of too much tension and no freedom. As a doctor, you still got the tension, but now there was respect, an acknowledgement of your usefulness. Of course, sometimes you’d get scared. They’d simply leave you alone with a patient and say do this and this, and you’ll be like “Haaa!! I’m still a small boy, Sir. Please don’t let the” Dr” in my name deceive you, my Chief!”

But you’ll be fine, just be calm and smart, and you’ll discover that whatever is asked of you is what you already know. You’re just not used to doing it yet. A little patience with one’s self and you’ll move through surgery with ease.

Surgery is like the toughest posting. After all the theatre sessions and clinics and ward rounds and extracting teeth of the “Emekas” ( Emeka is a popular name among the Ibo tribe of Nigeria, a tribe whose bones are denser than the general Nigerian population, thus their dental extraction are on the average more difficult to carry out), you begin to feel that “Yes! You’re truly working for your money!  Then I got thrown into Preventive. It was like going from a furnace to ice. I was chilled to the bone.

And then in the fourth month, the alert rang. 

The glorious sound from heaven. My guy, money is good! Money is one of the sweetest things in this life!! Trust me! Money is good! The money will first slap all your saliva dry. You will catch anaemia and polycythemia at once. The feeling is almost indescribable. Half a million in your account, all to your name, you’ll think EFCC will track you down or something. It’s just beautiful. Lifestyle will change, now after a hectic week of work you and your guys can just drive to a bar and chill and gist like real men with Ego!! Real men, I tell you!!

Then you go into the Restorative and the Pediatric Dentistry. And all in all, you simply begin to realize that as a Dental house officer you are merely reaping the harvest of all the sufferings you suffered as a dental student. The medical guys are finally working full 24/7 shift. While you simply hustle your 9 to 4 and then chill afterwards. 

In Conservative dentistry, it’s just like a mini-surgery all over again. Fillings, RCTs, LUTH factors join. But all in all, it is a most beautiful place. You delve into the dark miniature world of root canals, those meandering hard-to-tread paths, and in them, where there was once bacteria and necrosis, you leave behind sealants and obturants. It is just beautiful. 

Dental Internship is a time of peace and chill. To be fully savoured. 

Of course, the future ahead is more uncertain. But the immediate future of internship is one a dental student should look forward to as his/her reward for the torture of dental school.