THE MANY FACES OF PAIN

Ayoposi Ojelabi

Pain followed me through this journey in ways I never expected. It did not come in one form. It arrived in layers physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and each layer revealed something about me that comfort had quietly concealed.

Most people, when they think about serious illness, think first about physical pain. The procedures. The needles. The weakness. That pain was real. But it was not always the hardest kind.

The palliative conversation

There was a day the palliative doctor came to speak with me before the bone marrow transplant. He explained that part of his role was to ensure clarity before high-risk procedures. He mentioned that some patients choose to document their wishes. Just in case.

That phrase just in case carried more weight than any diagnosis ever had.

It was the first time death was acknowledged directly in the room. Not as a distant possibility, but as something close enough to prepare for.

I did not react dramatically. I did not argue. But something shifted inside me that I have never quite been able to return to the way it was before.

The RIG insertion

The gastrostomy tube insertion remains one of the worst pains I have ever endured.

Three days of agony. No painkiller worked. Even breathing became torture. I could not eat, could not sleep, could not find any position that offered relief. I did not understand what was wrong and neither, for a time, did anyone else.

It took a specialist nurse, carefully reviewing my CT scan, to notice that the tube had been tightened too much against my stomach wall. The moment it was corrected, the relief was so sudden and complete that it felt almost unreal like being released from something I had been trapped inside.

That experience taught me something important about pain. Sometimes it is not the illness causing it. Sometimes it is something that can be fixed. But first someone has to look closely enough to find it.

After the transplant

After the bone marrow transplant, urinating felt like fire moving through my body. It was a type of pain that made me dread even the most basic bodily function the kind no one prepares you for because there are no useful words for it beforehand.

Losing my voice

When my tracheostomy was cuffed up, I lost my voice completely.

I was still fully conscious. My mind was working. I had things to say, questions to ask, needs to express. But nothing came out. I communicated through an alphabet chart pointing to one letter at a time, waiting for someone to understand and even then the simplest thought took several painful minutes to convey.

That silence was its own kind of suffering. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I had everything to say and no way to say it. Being fully present inside yourself while the world continues around you without your participation is a loneliness that is difficult to describe and harder to forget.

Watching the patient beside me

In the ICU, I heard the patient in the next bed pass away.

I heard the change in the monitors. The shift in the room. The quiet that followed.

Later, I watched CPR being performed on a patient directly opposite me.

These things leave marks that no discharge letter records. They settle quietly and remain. Each time I questioned why I was still fighting, those moments answered.

The pain of inability

One of the deepest pains of this entire journey was not being able to support my wife or be present for my daughter in the ways I believed I should have been.

Esther carried everything while I lay in a hospital bed in another city. She raised Tiara, managed our home, went to work, and still travelled to visit me. I could not relieve her of any of it. I could not lift a single part of the weight she was carrying.

That helplessness reached somewhere physical inside me that medicine could not touch.

The four walls

Before my illness, I was rarely still. My life was movement driving between Lagos and Ibadan to see my wife, playing football with friends, filling days with purpose and noise.

Suddenly my life shrank to the size of a room. The same ceiling. The same walls. The same narrow view.

It took longer than I expected to learn how to live inside that space. To find something worth paying attention to within limits I had not chosen. But eventually I did. And that, too, was a kind of strength.

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Pain did not arrive only to weaken me, even though it often felt that way.

It stripped away every illusion and left me face to face with who I was beneath work, movement, and certainty. It taught me patience I did not know I possessed. It taught me humility. It taught me to recognise the value of very small victories.

Most importantly, it taught me that survival does not always look heroic.

Sometimes it is simply choosing to breathe through the fire and remain where you are not because you are certain things will improve, but because remaining is what strength looks like at that moment.

Pain did not define my story.

But it sharpened it.