Image source: metaAi
Amaka didn’t just want to be a doctor. She grew up believing it was already part of her future—like something waiting patiently for her to arrive.
“I will be a doctor,” she would say, not as a wish, but as a fact.
She said it while sitting on a low wooden stool in her mother’s small provisions shop in Benin City, legs swinging freely, counting biscuits for customers. She said it when she followed her father to the pharmacy and watched the way the pharmacist handled drugs with care. She said it even when other children around her were unsure of what they wanted to become.
For Amaka, it was clear.
It started the year her father became seriously ill. She was still young, but old enough to notice the fear in her mother’s voice and the tension that hung around the house. They spent days moving from one hospital to another, waiting on hard benches, listening to nurses call out names.
There was one doctor she never forgot—a young woman who spoke calmly and looked directly into people’s eyes when she talked. That doctor had smiled at Amaka and said, “Your dad is strong. He’ll be okay.”
It wasn’t just what she said—it was how she said it. Like she carried something powerful inside her. Something steady.
Amaka wanted that.
From that moment, everything became practice. Her dolls were no longer just dolls; they were patients. Her younger brother became her unwilling assistant. Even small injuries in the compound turned into “emergencies” she took very seriously.
By the time she got to secondary school, people already knew her for it.
“Doctor Amaka,” her classmates would tease.
But she didn’t mind. She wore the name like a badge.
She studied hard—harder than most. Biology felt natural to her. Chemistry too, though it stretched her sometimes. Physics? That one tested her patience, but she refused to back down. She stayed after school to ask questions, borrowed textbooks, read whenever she could.
Her mother believed in her deeply, even when things were tight.
“My daughter will wear white coat one day,” she would say proudly, even when she was just trying to sell bread and sachet water to customers who barely listened.
But belief doesn’t always make the road easier.
During her WAEC exams, things began to shift.
Two days before her Biology paper, her father fell sick again. This time, it was serious. The kind of serious that made adults whisper in corners and rush out of the house at odd hours.
Amaka found herself moving between the hospital and her books, trying to hold everything together. She would read at night in the hospital waiting area, her eyes heavy, her mind scattered.
She wrote the exam, but she knew it wasn’t her best.
When the results came out, her grades were decent—but not strong enough for medicine.
It hurt more than she expected.
Still, she didn’t give up.
“Try again,” her teacher encouraged her. “You’re close.”
So she registered for JAMB and pushed herself even harder. This time, she studied like someone trying to outrun time itself. Early mornings, late nights, constant revision.
When her result came out, she had done well. Really well.
Hope came back.
But then came the waiting.
Admission lists were released.
Her name wasn’t there.
She checked again. And again. Supplementary list? Nothing.
People started giving advice—unsolicited, sometimes frustrating.
“Do you know anyone inside?”
“Maybe change your course first.”
“You know these things need money…”
Money.
That word kept coming up, like a quiet wall she couldn’t see over.
She decided to try one more time.
But life didn’t wait for her plans.
Her father passed away.
Just like that, everything changed.
School became something distant. Survival came closer. Her mother’s shop couldn’t carry the family anymore, and as the first child, Amaka stepped in without being asked.
She started spending more time in the shop. Then she picked up small side jobs—helping a tailor, selling food in the evenings, doing whatever she could to support the house.
Books slowly disappeared from her daily life.
Not because she stopped loving them, but because there was no time left.
She would still look at hospitals when she passed by. Sometimes she slowed down a bit, watching doctors and nurses move in and out, feeling something twist quietly inside her.
Her friends moved on. Some got into university. A few even started studying medicine—the very thing she had dreamed about for years.
She celebrated them, truly. But after the smiles faded, there was always that silence she had to sit with.
Years went by.
One afternoon, a little girl ran into the shop crying, her knee bleeding from a fall. The mother looked flustered, trying to calm her.
Amaka stepped forward without thinking.
“Come, let me see,” she said softly.
She cleaned the wound, spoke gently, distracted the child with small talk until the crying reduced.
“Thank you,” the woman said, relieved. “Are you a nurse?”
Amaka paused for a second.
So many answers rushed through her mind, but none of them felt right.
She smiled, a little faintly. “No… I just know small things.”
That night, she lay awake longer than usual.
For once, she didn’t push the thoughts away.
She allowed herself to sit with it fully—the dream, the effort, the way things had turned out.
She didn’t become a doctor.
Not because she was lazy.
Not because she didn’t have the brains.
But because life happened in ways she couldn’t control.
Still, something remained.
People in her area came to her for small help—cuts, minor burns, basic care. She learned more about first aid. Sometimes she volunteered at a nearby clinic when they needed an extra hand.
It wasn’t the life she had imagined as a child.
But in small, quiet ways, she still found herself doing what she once loved.
And every now and then, usually when everything was quiet, she would whisper it—not loudly, not boldly like before, but softly.
“I wanted to be a doctor.”
It didn’t sound like a plan anymore.
It sounded like something she once held very tightly… and somehow had to let go.
