ONE afternoon in July 2013 while descending the stairs of a Lagos hospital where she worked as an auxiliary nurse, Abosede Oriabure, 45, heard a snap in her left knee. She felt a sharp pain.

The pain persisted for a few minutes but later subsided. Although the pain did not completely disappear, it was nothing serious beyond a mild ache and she did not think much about it.

But days later, the pain returned with a vengeance. Her knee was practically burning from the inside. She could barely lift her left leg. To ease the unrelenting pain, Mrs Oriabure resorted to self-medication. She used Tramadol, a recently banned painkiller, oxycodone and other similarly addictive analgesics.

But the pain never went away. In fact, it got worse.

As the pain became increasingly excruciating, she visited an orthopaedic doctor, who recommended she did an MRI scan to determine why the pain had persisted. The cost of the MRI Scan was N85,000.00. Unemployed and barely scraping a living, the mother of three could not raise the money. She resigned to taking the addictive painkillers to get by one day at a time. When she thought things could not get worse, one Sunday in August 2018 she woke up and discovered that her left knee had twisted into an arc giving her a K-shaped stance when she managed to stand upright.
After months of enduring excruciating pains, she managed to do the MRI scan in September 2019 after her husband took a loan from a consumer credit finance firm. Although she has been told she may be needing a knee replacement surgery, her doctor told her that the pressure on the knee during the six years she waited before seeking professional help may have caused irreparable damage to the knee.

“My condition would have been better if I had done the MRI scan in 2013 or soon after and started treatment then. But I couldn’t raise N85,000 then,” she said.

Read more: https://www.icirnigeria.org/investigation-kickbacks-for-referrals-how-nigerian-doctors-hospitals-diagnostic-centres-are-defrauding-patients/