A husband shows `the power of love'
For nearly five months, Peter Oladipo's daily routine has seldom wavered.
He sees his older daughters off to school, leaves his baby in the care of a friend and travels from his family's apartment in Vanier to the Civic hospital. There, he spends the afternoon at his wife's bedside, talking to her, praying, massaging her immobile limbs and giving her food he has prepared.
He has been there every day since last September, when a medical catastrophe during childbirth left Motunrayo Oladipo fighting for her life.
For two months, the 40-year-old mother of three was on life support machines.
Today, she is breathing on her own, is stable and shows signs of improvement. But she has extreme health challenges. She suffers from brain damage and partial paralysis, some of the cascade of damage done when a blood clot travelled to her heart during childbirth on Sept. 27.
It is a day that changed everything in the lives of the Oladipo family — mother, father and two school-aged daughters — who had arrived in Canada from Nigeria three years earlier seeking refugee status.
Peter remembers in excruciating detail the day his third daughter was born.
After nearly 24 hours of long and painful labour, Motunrayo began having a seizure, which her husband watched in horror, not understanding what he was seeing. While a panicked Peter asked what was happening to his wife, medical staff rushed Motunrayo into surgery to deliver the baby by caesarean section.
Peter, who is deeply religious, called Joseph Ogbehor, the pastor from his church, and put his phone on speaker while the pastor prayed for him and his wife.
Their baby girl, Joanna, who was rushed to CHEO immediately after birth, is now thriving. But doctors were uncertain whether Motunrayo would survive. She initially had no detectable pulse and, at first, doctors thought she was dead. After she was placed on life support, tests showed that a lack of oxygen left her with damage on one side of the brain.
“She is very sick,” they told Peter. “We do not know about the longterm effects.”
Peter, though, has never given up his faith that she will recover.
After weeks on life-support machines, Motunrayo came out of a coma and opened her eyes. She was initially on dialysis because her kidneys had shut down, but no longer requires it. Her husband, juggling his hospital visits with caring for their newborn, has seen slow but steady improvement.
Still, he has been advised to keep his expectations low.
Medical staff have suggested he send Motunrayo to a nursing home to get the care she needs, saying she is not ready for rehabilitation. Motunrayo cannot walk, although she can now stand. But he is determined to bring her home, and he believes she will get much better there.
“What she needs most is therapy. That is what she needs now.”
In a nursing home, she won't get that, he says.
He is making arrangements to set up a hospital bed at home and has arranged for nursing care and some therapy.
“I love her and can't leave her,” he says simply.
Karine Langley, a psychotherapist who has worked with members of the family, calls Peter's dedication remarkable.
“It is the power of love. He is there every day,” she says.
Peter, who has witnessed his wife regain consciousness, begin to move one side of her body, recognize him, begin to swallow food and even laugh over the past months, says he believes his wife will recover. “I don't give up in any situation.”
He says he hopes that determination will inspire others facing hard times.
“He really wants people not to give up, despite all the hardships,” says Langley. “His faith is pulling him through.”
It was that kind of determination and faith that brought Peter, Motunrayo, and their two daughters to Canada in 2017. The family was fleeing violence in Nigeria, including pressure to have their young girls undergo female genital mutilation.
The parents feared they would be unable to protect the girls, now 13 and nine, if they remained there.
The excruciating and dangerous practice, performed with a razor blade, had resulted in the death of Motunrayo's sister when she was young.
Motunrayo also underwent the procedure when she was a child, “and she didn't want her daughters to go through the same thing,” Peter said.
The couple was determined that would not be their daughters' fates.
They shielded their daughters from the threat, only talking to them about it once they had ,arrived in Canada.
Their older daughter was horrified after going on YouTube to learn about the practice.
“This is what they wanted to do to me?” she asked her parents.
Peter and Motunrayo had faith that life in Canada, where they sought protection as refugee claimants, would be better. They worked hard to make it so.
The family initially landed in the United States before coming to Montreal, where the parents worked in retail and other jobs.
They later moved to Ottawa, where Peter had been working as a security guard before he stopped work to take care of the new baby and his family full-time.
Motunrayo was healthy before giving birth, with no unusual risk factors, says Peter, although her age put her at some increased risk.
The risk of life-threatening complications during pregnancy, while relatively low in Canada, has increased in recent years, largely because women are having children later in life.
A 2019 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that mothers who were 45 or older, or were low-income, were at the highest risk of serious outcomes from pregnancy.
Peter says he was told by doctors that the complications could have been due to his wife's age. Still, at 40, Motunrayo was both healthy and strong, he says.
Peter says prayer and his faith are helping him to face the challenges that continue. And he is optimistic that bringing his wife home will bring more improvement.
His hopes for her are high: “Total recovery of her legs, of her hands … everything.”