Terrible things I have seen(1)

How many "what-a-bad-day-to-have-eyes moments have you seen?" I guess some of us have had quite a few, while people like me have had, a couples of handfuls to be light in words, scratch that pal! See these eyes of mine👀? I have seen a shitload of "what-the-f***" moments with them(just saying how I feel🙄). There are times I wonder how I managed not to have fainted or piss myself during one of those moments. Some of these moments scared the living hell out of me, some of them kept me wondering for days on what the hell I had just seen, others left me feeling like an emotionless bag of meat and eventually plunged me into depression for days or sometimes even weeks. Without further rambling let's get at them:

• I have witnessed a slaughter, not that of a Christmas chicken, not that of an Eid ram, bull or camel, but that of a person, again, not in movies but in real West African Standard Time, right before my then innocent pair of eyes! This was during the period when we used to live in Kaduna(a state in Nigeria) with my parents before moving to Kano. It was during the 2011 presidential elections period. I wasn't very much different from a kid back then and I definitely shouldn't have seen that. You might be wondering what a kid was doing outside to have witnessed such traumatizing event while a violent riot was ongoing right? Well I wasn't really outside. I was looking through the window and it so happened to be my fate to have witnessed such inhumanity. The moment my eyes caught the act happening, I was so horror-stricken that I couldn't even bring myself to look away. This gave me countless nightmares for months and I eventually fell really ill. I deliberately didn't go to detail on how I saw it happen because reliving that memory is the last thing I want to do.

• I have once witnessed a gut-wrenching highway accident that literally took the willingness to board any form of transportation from me for quite some time, not even a bicycle. This accident happened when I was in an all girls boarding school. It happened on a Friday which is an outing day when we are allowed to spend a fixed amount of time outside school to get essentials. The school road is a very busy one and it so happened that I was again, unlucky to have witnessed such.

We were walking at the side of the road when a car somersaulted right above our heads, it was going the opposite direction. The car literally flew like a bird for whatever reason and a passenger, was pulled out of the window mid-air. He fell on the tarred road on his stomach which busted like a balloon, littering the road with intestines and other viscera of the human body. His head broke into pieces like a bottle and you could see his brain spill out of his ears. That was it for me. That was it for me, I and the girl with whom I was together sprinted to back to school, letting out our withheld vomit the moment we set foot. That had me sick in the stomach and head for about two weeks. That was the first time I witnessed human internal organs before I started dealing with cadavers in medical school. Still, I feel like I am to witness such incident again(God forbid!) , I would probably have the same reaction regardless. There's clearly a difference between witnessing how such a thing happened and seeing it when it already happened, besides cadavers aren't as bloody as fresh bodies.

To be continued...

Thanks for reading.

Yours Layly,

❤️❤️❤️❤️