Ayoka Falana was born in the small rural village of Nakanda some thirty-five miles outside of Lagos in Nigeria. They had no running water save a hand operated pump in the middle of the village, courtesy of UNICEF and their water for Africa project. Their only electricity was an old petrol driven Yamaha generator given to the village by the Help Africa Foundation. After it had run out of gas there was no money to get any more, so it simply stood outside the headman’s hut and rotted away.
But now Ayoka was in one of the most sophisticated cities in the world. London. And more specifically, in the Royal Chelsea Hospital in Chelsea, London. And the major difference between London and her home village, was that in the hospital in London there was no hand pump for water. So she, and hundreds of others around her, were slowly dying of dehydration.
The irony of the situation did not strike Ayoka. She was not a person who had ever thought in terms of irony or sarcasm or paradox. She thought in more simple terms, she worked hard and she usually got what she wanted.
Although she had never formally attended school her mother had taught her to read and write to a rudimentary level and, from the age of fourteen, she had helped out in the district’s local clinic. Rolling bandages, sterilizing instruments and cleaning up. By the age of fifteen she had decided that she wanted to be a nurse. A real one with a nice white uniform and a hat and sensible shoes and a watch that hung from a chain on your breast.
Both her mother and father had approved of her ambition so, the two of them had saved every spare cent that they earned. By the time Ayoka was nineteen years old, they had saved enough to bribe one of the corrupt officials at the Babalola State University to issue her with a fake nurse’s degree.
Her proudest moment of her life was when her father returned home from the university and presented her with the certificate.
Ayoka Felana BSc (Hons) Nursing.
She had immediately applied for a nursing post in London, England and had been accepted by all three hospitals that she had applied to.
The entire extended family had banded together to buy her airplane ticket and she had been promised a room in Earls Court with a distant relative for the first month.
She had arrived in London on a Saturday morning; spent the rest of the weekend acclimatizing and started work on the Monday.
That was the day of the first pulse.
It was now 72 hours later.
When the pulse had struck and the entire building was plunged into powerless darkness, the first effects were felt in the operating theaters. All of the theaters were internal rooms with no access to natural lighting. All operations are carried out under HD-LED lighting and the air is controlled through a pressurized laminar flow system. So when the power went and the backup generators were unable to kick in, the operating theaters were plunged into utter pitch black. This, combined with the fact that the anesthetic machines could no longer operate meant that patients were waking up in the middle of their operations in the stygian darkness of hell.
Open heart surgery, stomach surgery, lung surgery. Patients screaming in agony, thrashing around, falling off the operating tables while surgeons and nurses stumbled around in the dark, stepping on the patient’s exposed insides. Crushing and maiming. Scalpels cutting into fumbling hands and contaminated needles puncturing groping fingers.
In the neonatal ward thirty-two babies in incubators died within eight minutes.
All patients on life support died within minutes.
By that evening over ninety percent of the patients in the intensive care unit had died.
The next day was far worse. The nine elevators were inaccessible and seven of them had patients prepped for surgery. By that stage, seven out of the nine lifts contained at least one dead body. Water also ran out that morning.
And then the fires started. Doctors were attempting to provide primary care via candle and firelight and it was only a matter of time before a bottle of surgical spirits came into contact with a naked flame. The resulting explosion burned two doctors and a mother in labor to death. The child survived until the next day when it succumbed to burns and infection. The fire was contained via the use of fire extinguishers, one of the few things that still worked.
By that evening the dead and dying lay everywhere. The toilets didn’t work and the corridors ran with raw sewage. The stench of death and decay filled the stagnant building like a miasma. Rioting and full scale looting started at around six that evening as people, desperate for diabetic insulin, antibiotics and pain relief stormed the hospital and ransacked it in a frantic search.
The looters started more fires that spread quickly.
And, almost 72 hours to the minute after the pulse Ayoka Falana, dehydrated and exhausted after three days without sleep, succumbed to smoke inhalation.
Her last thoughts were that her family, with their lack of modern amenities, would most probably never even know that the pulse had ever occurred.
Chapter 8