The morning of 14 May 2018 was not a routine one for the middle-aged Professor of Pediatric surgery and Medical Director of the Federal Medical Centre Yola, Professor Awwal Muhammad Abubakar as members of his surgical team had assembled for yet another important day in the history of the hospital and that of their professional practice.
Masked and gloved health workers comprising of surgeons, anesthetists, radiologists, laboratory scientists and nurses formed a single line as they marched in to the theatre where the conjoined twins lay. The twins, said to be delivered by Cesarean section in Maiduguri on November, 25, 2017, with a combined birth weight of 4.5kg, shared a single umbilical cord and were joined from the mid thorax to the mid-abdomen.
This is the second time in five years that the hospital successfully performed such an operation, giving itself a reputation for excellence, so team work was essential.
| Mother of the twins Kellu Adam with her co-joined children before the surgery
“In the theatre, we labelled the babies red and blue so that you don’t get confused and give the same baby drugs twice. Even though after the separation, I and others took care of one baby and another group took care of the other. All these were predetermined. It was during strike, but all relevant health workers suspended the strike and helped. We are not anticipating any complication. They can live like any baby. All their organs function well. But we kept them here for weeks . They have started sitting now after the surgery”. “Immediately they were separated, everyone in the room got excited. We broadcast the surgery live to a room downstairs, not realising the parents were watching,” Awwal said, as theirs was an ICT-compliant surgery. He could not hide his feelings, saying that after treating the children, he felt gratified by the parents’ happiness. “Pediatrics as a field, is not as monotonous as other branches of medicine, so you feel happy after treating your patients and you see parents laughing. I led two successful surgeries in Maiduguri before coming here. We have few pediatric surgeons in Nigeria. We are just over 100 now. When we were on training there were very few of us,” Awwal said. The twins’ parents, Muhammad Ramat (30) and Kellu Adam (27), both from Borno State, got married in 2015, and the conjoined twins are their only children. The father is a small-scale trader and undergraduate student at the University of Maiduguri, while the mother studied Health Education at the same university and has just completed the mandatory NYSC and is unemployed. |
Awwal first became a hero in 2013, soon after he joined the hospital on sabbatical from the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital when his team performed the surgery that separated a set of conjoined twins, to become the first of its kind in the history of the hospital. The news of the recent and second successful operation, being the separation of four-month-old female conjoined twins, Aisha and Fatima, was broken at a press conference by the team who explained that preparations for the actual surgery had been going on for weeks since the team was assembled.
The conjoined twins were taken to Federal Medical Centre, Yola, in Adamawa State on March 25, 2018, to be separated.
Professor Awwal told Daily Trust that Fatimah and Maryam, now having a combined weight of 11kg, were eventually successfully separated on Monday, May 14, 2018, following a four-hour surgical operation, then transferred to the Intensive Care Unit of the health facility for post-operative management. Having been certified fit with the resumption of normal feeding, they were transferred to the ward on the second day after the surgery.
Professor Awwal explaned that no complication was expected from the surgery, and that the twins had started oral feeding and sitting few weeks after the surgery, indicating they would live normal lives.
It was an additional credit to a health facility that has been clamouring for upgrade to the status of a teaching hospital. Add it to the fact that the hospital serves communities far beyond its catchment area with patients coming from Adamawa, Taraba, southern part of Borno and across the border in Cameroon Republic.
The parents are from Borno, the epicenter of Boko Haram insurgency, where insecurity has affected healthcare delivery, and worsened the existing poverty levels.
The two ministers in the Federal Ministry of Health got excited and congratulated Awwal and the management of FMC Yola over the milestone, urging him to keep the pace in his administrative and professional strides.
The lead surgeon gave insight in to the surgery, saying the CT scan was conducted free of charge by the Neuropsychiatric Centre in Maiduguri and Adamawa-German Hospital while the hospital shouldered the cost of the surgery, running into millions, as the parents could not afford it.
The parents thanked the hospital management for sponsoring the surgery, their feeding, accommodation and drugs during their stay in the hospital, adding that counselling by Professor Awwal, Dr. Wabada Samuel and Professor Fola Faponle gave them strength and faith before the surgery. The couple called on federal government, corporate organisations as well as wealthy individuals to equip the FMC Yola with state-of-the-art technology such as CT scan and MRI equipment to improve its capacity and ease the suffering of patients who had to travel to other states for investigations.
The Medical Director also lamented that the hospital which serves patients from neighbouring Borno and Taraba states as well as from Cameroon could not boast of modern imaging equipment, which are critical to health service delivery. He noted that although construction of four new wards was captured in 2018 budget, the hospital was in dire need of general equipment upgrade and a standard out-patient department to serve the growing population of patients.
Daily Trust investigations revealed that the centre has to cater for more patients from parts of Borno, including Chibok area, as insurgency limits their access to tertiary health centres in Maiduguri.
Awwal lamented that the average waiting time, especially for surgical patients, runs into months. “Now we discharge them earlier to have the space. We have like 300 beds including multi drug resistant TB (40 beds) for which we have a special centre here for the North East. We appreciate that four wards are budgeted for in 2008, but the hospital needs CT scan and MRI. Also, digital x-ray is very critical and we don’t have that. We also need general equipment upgrade and standard out-patient department,” he said.
