Between Fanyogo & Arik Rice

So my wife and I were in Onikan-bound traffic on Ahmadu Bello bridge about three weeks ago and she spotted some dude hawking 'ice cream'. The sun wasn't taking any prisoners that particular afternoon so when she offered me Fanyogo I didn't think it was such a bad idea given the circumstances. Oh, how wrong I was...

I insisted a check of the expiry dates on the packs of the dairy products before she paid just to be safe and they appeared to be in order. So, I occupied myself in traffic with frozen Fanyogo forgetting that I had a direct six hour flight the following morning. Having done a lot of interstate travelling during my medical school, I had inculcated the habit of thoroughly emptying my bowels before embarking on any journey. So I was confident that whatever happened, an early morning lavatory expedition would sufficiently fix any threats - given that science asserted that normal gastric emptying time i.e. the time it will take the contents of the stomach to completely empty into the small intestine, was four hours. Again, I was very wrong!

The elders say he who the gods want to kill, they first make mad. That was the only tenable explanation I could posit considering the next flaw in judgement I committed. As if I had not tested fate enough on the ground, I devoured the in-flight 'meal' Arik served me. It was probably because I was particularly hungry as I had intentionally skipped breakfast to forestall any digestive exigencies while in transit. Arik Air, being proudly Nigerian, offered me something with some semblance of cooked rice and chicken and red eyes made me chew like my life depended on it.

The first red flag was when I had to empty my bladder mid-flight. I usually never enter the conveniences aboard but the urge to do 'number one' was too strong to ignore. Folks, male and female, had been coming in and going out of the john so I was deeply disgusted when I entered and the toilet bowl was almost filled to the brim with sullage and toilet paper. I ran back! How had all these people I had been seeing entering and exiting been using this I wondered. I accosted one of the attendants and asked if there was another loo as the central one was apparently non-functional. He didn't seem surprised and pointed another to me at the rear of the plane. I entered and it was exactly the same. I suddenly realized I could actually manage till we landed.

Forty minutes to our estimated time of landing, I felt a strange quickening in my rectum. It couldn't be what I thought now, could it?. At how many thousand feet above sea level and with Arik's wonderment facilities. Surely the devil wasn't that powerful. Or was he?

I recited every nursery rhyme that came to mind just to remain focused on everything but my own gastrointestinal tract. I even used 'twinkle twinkle little star' as the second stanza of 'Solomon Grundy'. I wasn't planning to face Immigration Services with soiled clothes. Finally to my relief, we started our descent into Heathrow and eventually landed. It then took ages before my pilot graciously parked his aircraft. The taxiing was endless it seemed. It was the day that my colon was doing the rumba that we had to wait for ten minutes because the pilot could not cross an 'active runway'. Many are the afflictions of the righteous!

I entered the first lavatory I saw as we approached the arrival gates but apparently many folks on the flight had been holding their urges also, no thanks to Arik. The room was filled with men going about their business and I decided against unleashing what was in me there. It would have been too embarrassing. A queue was already forming to even use the bathrooms anyway so I ran out again. This was London after-all, not Murtala. I could swear there were other conveniences close-by, I just had to find them. They couldn't be as blunted mentally as my people. A few feet away, I saw the yellow sign and this time the room was bigger and empty. Ah! Devil na area-boy but God na Godfather.

At that point, I remembered a picture I had seen on social media that said

'people say love is the best feeling but finding a toilet when you have diarrhea is a better feeling'. I also remembered the chorus of Miley Cyrus' 'Wrecking Ball'. Thank God the (un)fortunate toilet bowl that encountered me was inanimate so it couldn't say what it 'saw' that fateful day. Flesh and blood had not revealed to it what was coming that Tuesday.

It would have been interesting though carrying such a 'burden' to processing desk of the British Immigration service. I imagine I would have been sweating profusely by that time with a lot of twitching. I'd also probably have been stammering when answering questions about my purpose of visit to the UK. It would have been a miracle convincing the officer that a bag of 'coco' hadn't burst in my stomach. Na okada for carry me go back Oshodi!

The enemy came like a 'flood'. Literally. Jehovah had the final say and delivered me! 

Someone shout a mighty hallelujah...

Imagine the headline in Punch newspaper the next day. 'Thirty year old APC medical doctor shits on himself en-route London'.