Alhaja Ashiata Abike Onikoyi nee Laguda will be 94 years old this October and she lives a full life though she has the dreaded SS genotype.
Alhaja Laguda, as she is popularly called, said during an interview with The Nation, that she stopped having Sickle Cell attacks after she turned 40, though her genotype remains same. “Doctors see me and wonder what a miracle I am.” the nonagenarian says.
She recalled that being sickly was tougher at the time she was growing up because nobody knew about sickle cell anaemia. She was always sick to the point that in a whole year, she may attend school only about three months of the entire annual school calendar while she spent the other months sick and at home.
Her words: “I was taken to the hospital; then they still brought all sorts of concoction from the Igbo tribe, from Yoruba people and from Hausa part of the country, because it was a very serious sickness. I just took everything that they gave me. They would cut me on every part of my body but I gave myself to them because I wanted to live.
“They called me abiku and several other names, but thank God things have changed today. Also, the government is doing everything within its power to enlighten the people about the disease.”
She said her father pampered her because he feared he could lose her at any moment. So he mostly kept her away from school.
“If he didn’t die, I probably wouldn’t have been educated because he said I should be left at home, so that they can watch over me every time.
“He insisted that because of my nature, no teacher should beat me. He would say I should be left at home even when I was not having any attacks; but when he died I had no choice because my mum insisted I went to school. That, in a nutshell, was how it became possible for me to go to school.
“If I went to school and it was going to rain, they would bring a car to pick me, because the rain must not touch me. I must not go out in the cold, I must not step on wet ground; I couldn’t even stay where there was a fan, let alone in a cold weather.
“But all that is gone now. Since I clocked forty, I have not had any attacks,” she reveals.
Alhaja would later go to England for Secretariat Studies even though some concerned persons had tried to dissuade her mother against her going out of concern for her – think English weather. She went on anyway and subsequently received better care.
Alhaja would also later meet and marry her first husband and have children.
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