The name ‘Befibrillator’ was born in my fifth year of medical school. Internal Medicine (particularly the Cardiology section) was my favorite posting in my clinical years of medical school. I also grasped the concept of an Electrocardiogram and how to read the print-out graph papers of this device, which displayed the results of tests carried out on people, a little bit earlier than my group mates. Sometimes my teacher would personally give me more difficult graphs to decipher than the others, consequently.
There was this afternoon when we were discussing a topic (I don’t vividly recall the name), and essentially, the illness or disease required many different therapeutic modalities, and so as she kept on dictating while we jotted down, something just sprung in me, and I asked her, ‘Why don’t they just create something that will solve all the problems at once?’ She smiled, looked at me, then said, ‘Adeboye, I hope that maybe one day, you will create such a device’.
After she said that, it was as if these group of words connected directly with my soul as from then on, I realized that one of the things I would love to do on this earth before I leave is to create a medical device. This moment didn’t directly lead to the origination of the name ‘Befibrillator’, however, it wasn’t too long afterward that I coined it.
I loved Cardiology and the human heart from the moment I was introduced to them; I also loved the concept of a defibrillator, so I used the first letter of the name most people know me as, ‘Boye’, to replace the D in Defibrillator. It was in December of 2012 (still in the same Internal Medicine class) when I was drawing some form of Graffiti on my books that the idea and name occurred to me.
At that time, while I knew that was to be my brand name moving forward, I did not have a properly crafted plan for my future and neither did I know that it would revolve around wellness or art.
But it was from that time that I started dreaming about making a medical device and it was less than three months later that I felt that the next direction for me to move in life was to transition into the career of biomedical engineering.
The wellness dream was born and developed roughly three years after the fashioning of the name. However, I did not see any sign or envision that I would become an artist, nor did I expect it to be the first projection of the Befibrillator brand.
Right from my childhood, I loved painting. I still remember the painting of a house and a garden which I so enthusiastically drew and colored for my mother; I’m sure she kept it to this day. So, I used to draw both in primary school and at home, and I loved it. Enter my first year in high (secondary) school, and we had to make a choice between fine art and music for our vocational subject. I selected music; I don’t know if it was because that’s what my older brother who was two forms ahead of me had chosen, or because I was genuinely interested in it (however, I suspect it was more of the latter; we had a little keyboard at home which some lesson teachers had used to introduce me to music so this undoubtedly sparked an interest in me).
And so, I chose music; I have no regrets to this today as music remains a big part of me, and playing the piano or keyboard is like magic for me, but you see, right from my first year in high school (JSS1), my eyes had been spying jealously on the activities ongoing amongst the fine art students in their class which just happened to be opposite our music class at the time. I used to admire how they made paintings of flowers, portraits, and just created anything artistic. So, I admired art, sculpture, and painting up until I was an adult but never tried it professionally.
You can say my heart was seriously yearning for it but I was being dismissive and ignorant about it. Or at least that’s what I thought my heart wanted. What I can say now is my heart yearned for ‘art’ as a means of expression, but not necessarily ‘fine art’. I am an abstract expressionist today and I love this branch of art or at least prefer it. I have nothing against fine art or any other art form (I admire and cherish anything art-related, even photography), but I love abstract art the most. Staring at that blank canvas and waving your hand to create something novel and intriguing always feels surreal to me. My favorite work then was ‘Convergence’ by Jackson Pollock. I have a collection of works where I wave my hands while I simultaneously listen to some favorite songs. One of my best from these works is the one I made to Lyves — Shelter. The flow was just wonderful; it felt like magic.
But I didn’t know this immediately. I would first try my hands at traditional pencil and paper. It went well for a while but it wasn’t really my thing so I put it off; this was in 2014. To cut a long story short, it was not until many years later when I was working in a Cardiology hospital that I fortuitously picked an interest in digital painting. It was while I and my Echocardiography partner, Tiffany, were chatting that I randomly started playing with the paint software on my laptop instead of reading (I was taking a break from one of the numerous Coursera courses I usually took during any free time I had; I think it had something to do with Vital signs). I recall painting a funny portrait of her jokingly using my nondominant hand (my left hand) and showing it to her after which we both laughed. That was my first day of painting digitally and that was how the digital painting thing started.
SOME OF MY EARLY WORKS:
