Blessing Makanjuola, a mental health practitioner, advocate, and feminist, didn’t choose this path; pain chose it for her. Her voice, now calm yet commanding, carries the weight of a story that turned personal suffering into public purpose.
“I was conscious while they cut me open,” she recalls softly, her eyes distant as though replaying the scene in her mind. “The spinal injection didn’t work, but the doctor began the surgery anyway. By the fourth cut, I held his hand and screamed.”
That moment, she says, changed her forever. It wasn’t just the physical pain, but the awakening that came with it.
“It made me realise how women’s voices are often ignored in spaces that concern their own bodies,” Blessing says. “I stopped being silent that day. Pain made me speak.”
Her story began like many others, a woman preparing for childbirth and trusting the system to care for her. But it took a frightening turn in the operating theatre when her anaesthetic failed. “I could hear everything, feel everything,” she says. “And when the nurse finally shouted that the spinal didn’t work, they had to give me general anaesthesia.”
The experience left her traumatised, but it also gave her a deeper understanding of the silent suffering many women endure in hospitals. “We are often told to be strong, to endure, to keep quiet,” she says. “But I’ve learned that strength also means speaking up.”
Her second pregnancy would later teach her even more about autonomy, fear, and faith. She recalls a nurse who questioned her choice to have a C-section, asking why her mother-in-law hadn’t approved.
“That moment shook me,” Blessing says. “It made me realise that too many women’s bodies are treated like community property. My body is mine. I get to decide what happens to it.”
Blessing’s journey through trauma, depression, and recovery has now evolved into advocacy. She has become a mental health practitioner, using her story to encourage open conversations around maternal health and emotional healing.
“Many women go through pain in silence,” she reflects. “They smile through it because they think nobody will understand. But if my voice can help even one woman seek help, then that pain wasn’t wasted.”
Today, she speaks in calm assurance, not as a victim but as a woman who turned agony into activism. Her message is simple yet powerful: listen to women, believe their stories, and give them the space to heal.
“I’ve learned that healing doesn’t mean forgetting,” she says with a faint smile. “It means owning your scars and helping others find the strength to face theirs.”
