Perhaps I should not be alive. But I am. Despite the odds, I turn 58 today. I am still frail and fragile. But now, I can stand on my feet again, bearing testimony to those sacred words of the Almighty Allah himself that, “No soul can ever die except by Allah’s leave and at a time appointed (Quran 3: 145),” YUSUPH OLANIYONU, communication strategist, journalist, lawyer and public affairs analyst, recounts his recent health challenges.
In no time, I began to depend on my wife to brush my teeth, clean myself in the bathroom, put food in my mouth, perform ablution, and do any chore that involved the use of my right hand. Then my right leg soon followed. It was like something was switching off my limbs one by one. Then at night, the pains descended on my neck and shoulder like a boulder. Sleep became impossible. Turning became a torture. To find a position of relief, that small posture that would grant me a respite from this oppressive pain, no matter how fleeting, became impossible. All through this ordeal, I had tried to be brave. Now, I could no longer hold back. I cried. The pain was just too much. And it came in the night. Therefore each night approached with terror because I knew what laid in wait for me in the dark. Maybe if I stayed up. I told my wife that perhaps, I should try to sleep in a sitting position. But nothing I tried helped. The name given to this one, this latest harbinger of pains, is cervical spondylosis. But little did we know that it was much worse than that. One Saturday, we decided to go to a private hospital that specialised in orthopaedics. We were told to come back the following week’s Wednesday. But the pain would not relent. Whatever I did, wherever I turned, it flogged me like an errant child. The hospital later called to make a change from Wednesday to Friday. But by then, we had already sought a more urgent alternative. At 9 p.m. that same night, we met the orthopaedic surgeon. He recommended some drugs and a neck collar, which I must now wear on like a shackle. That night, after a long time, I had a strange sleep without pains. But it was like shooing off a wild dog with a stick. It may back off for the moment, but it would come back. By the next day, the pain returned, ferocious, as if angry to be disrupted for one night.
Before our next appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon, we took the initiative to do an MRI test. But by then, my case had become a desperate emergency. All my limbs have packed up. Throughout these ordeals, I had never missed my prayers and supplications to Allah. But that morning, I could not move even one finger to press the electronic counter or hold the tasbih.
“Is this illness also going to separate me from my God in my last days?” I lamented to my wife. She said it was only temporary and everything would be fine. But I learnt she later went into the bathroom to cry. She is a brave woman. But I am sure by this time, even she would also have started to contemplate the worst.
When the orthopaedic surgeon saw the result of the MRI test, he took us to see a neurologist in a private hospital as well. The neurologist explained that some bones had ruptured in my neck, which had disorganised the nerve supply system from the brain down to the limbs. Again, I had to go in for a surgery to restore the functioning of the nerves. The operation was to be carried out on 13 May.
While waiting for the appointed date, my colleague, Akintoba Fatigun came to see me. He thought I was getting better. Many of my friends who were speaking to me on the phone thought the same, because despite all that I had suffered, my voice had remained strong and clear. I told Akintoba that in fact, the situation had gotten worse since the last time he visited and that I was actually waiting for another surgery.
When Akintoba left the house, he went straight to Dr Saraki’s residence and told him of my situation. The former Senate President immediately started to make calls to different hospitals in Saudi Arabia, the UK, and the US. I did not have a valid US visa and we had no time to apply for one. The Saudi hospital, after studying the MRI, later replied that they could not deal with the situation. Then, someone suggested Egypt. Contacts and appointments were made. To enter Egypt, one only needed a valid UK visa to obtain the Egyptian visa at the point of entry.
By Monday, 13th May, I was set to travel. Dr Saraki had purchased business class tickets for my wife and I. He also provided money to pay for the surgery and living expenses for a month. A day before my departure, the house was full with several family friends, despite our best efforts to keep the trip as confidential as possible. They were people from different parts of the country and people of different religious persuasions. At that point, I was not Yoruba or Muslim to them. I was just another human being. Even as I lay helplessly in bed, contemplating the motley crowd that had gathered in my room, I wondered if they thought they were saying a final goodbye to me.
It was time to go. My wife and second son, Oladipo, had already packed the bags. Then we realised that there was yet another important challenge. My room was on the second floor. How do I get down and into the car? We could only think of two options. Oladipo would have to carry me on his back and take me downstairs or I would have to crawl down the staircase. But even these two options were fraught with risks. Yes, I had lost so much weight and Dipo is a burly young man, but he is only 23. The thought of having my son carry me on his back because I could not walk was a distinct trauma on its own. But what if he slipped, and we both crashed to the ground? There could only be one outcome. How would the young man forgive himself? But none of these happened. Dipo successfully carried me downstairs and got me safely into the car.
On the way to the airport, I told my wife what my Plan B was, if Oladipo had been unable to carry me, to crawl downstairs. “That would have broken me,” she said. I responded with a joke that I needed her to remain unbroken because a broken man could not depend on a broken woman. In the last five months, she had become my in-house nurse, minder, and caregiver.
Five hours later, we landed in Cairo. My hospital, Neuro Espitalia, is located in a city called 6th of October, which is about an hour’s drive from the Cairo International Airport. I learnt that the city got its name in commemoration of the day one of the Arab-Israeli wars broke out. We were joined at the airport by my third son, Oladepo, who had arranged a two-week leave from his London office and another two weeks to work from the Cairo office of his company. He was to provide an additional hand to me in Egypt for the next one month. Our guide was a Nigerian gentleman called Rabiu Hamza, a PhD student in one of the Egyptian universities.
We arrived at the Neuro Espitalia at about midnight on that Monday. For the second time in almost a month, I had another sound sleep. Tuesday was devoted to various laboratory tests and to getting my medical history. On Wednesday morning, I had the surgery, which, as they explained, was to “clean an abscess in the cervical vertebrae, stabilise the cervical vertebrae and expand the neural canal.” I didn’t understand everything, but I just wanted to get well. The surgical operation was led by Professor Ibrahim Lotfy, an elderly but friendly surgeon, and Professor Dalia Rushdi.
After the successful operation, the surgical team decided to culture fragments of bones and tissues extracted from my back to determine what went wrong in the first place. It was an investigation that took days and a lot of blood tests. What they found was, to say the least, shocking. It was described in medical terms as “necrotizing Granulomatous Inflammation Compatible With Tuberculosis of the Vertebrae. No malignancy.” In short, it is called tuberculosis of the vertebrae. This was the stealthy thief that had been stealing my limbs, one by one. But even the surgery could not return everything this disease had stolen from me. I had to recover them myself by re-learning the use of my legs and hands again.
This was when I realised how much grateful humans should be to their creator for even the most simple things we take for granted everyday. I realised that even the mere ability to scratch one’s face when it itches, what we do countless times everyday without even thinking about it, is indeed a big deal. When my face itched, I would need my son or my wife to scratch it. To change my sleeping posture, I would need them. To change the position of my hands, or clean the sputum that come sometimes when I coughed, I needed them to do these and everything else for me.
At a point I could no longer fold my fingers to form a fist in order to allow nurses take blood samples or fix the cannula for intravenous infusion. Over the past five months, my arms had been covered in needle marks like a dedicated drug user; to administer some injections, to take blood or to fix the cannula for intravenous medication.
A few days after the surgery, I began physiotherapy sessions in the hospital. Several physiotherapists came to work on me. But a particular one stood out for me. His name is Ahmed El-Sanadidy, the man from Alexandria. Even after I left the hospital for a rented apartment close by, we contracted El Sanadidy to continue my rehabilitation therapy. He got paid per session. He was such an effective, devoted, passionate, friendly, hardworking, and creative professional. He was also in hot demand in his hometown, Alexandria, and in the city of the 6th of October. In the early part of our sessions, he would form a protective ring around me with his arms to guard me from falling. He taught me to walk all over again, to climb the stairs, to use my arms, to strengthen my fingers, and to regain some level of physical fitness. I called him ‘my boss’. He was the reason I extended my stay in Egypt to two months. He was making some very good progress with my rehabilitation and I did not want to terminate it abruptly.
But there was yet another challenge. The hospital had tried in vain to get me to go to the toilet. For almost two weeks, even after two sessions of enema, nothing came out. After we moved to the apartment, I thought the privacy of a home would help, but nothing. I would feel pressed to use the toilet and spend time siting and groaning in pain, but nothing would come out. It was later realised that the muscles around my waist had become so weak they could not exert sufficient pressure to push out the waste. This became another source of agonising pain. My stomach felt as solid as if I had been fed concrete cement. This became another major prayer point for me.
“You should be saying ‘Alhamdulilahi Rabbil alaamin’ because we should let our gratitude to God be more than our requests to Him,” my wife said one day as I was petitioning God over the agony of my plumbing problem. It was a test of faith. But it was also a lesson never to forget. One morning, the plumbing problem resolved itself, not in the most dignifying manner. Since then, it has been easier than ever doing my ‘toileting business’. For more than four months, I was carrying a catheter around. At a point, they became two. But now, I am free of both of them.
Now, I am a bit stable. I can walk unaided. At a time I could not even move a finger, but now I can sit down and type this piece on my iPad. I can perform my salat, the ablution, ruku (bowing), and the sujud (prostration), all on my own. There was a time in the past when I had to rely on people to do ablution for me and I had to pray lying down. I could not even turn my head to the left or right. I stared at the ceiling all the time and developed a system that enable me use marks on the POP on the ceiling as counter for my supplications. I have learnt not to take anything for granted and to thank my maker for enabling any physical move that I am able to make.
I have written this piece to celebrate the fact that I am alive, despite my ordeal in the past five months. But I have also written it to share my experience of the Nigerian medical system. Even before I traveled to Egypt, I realised that so much is wrong with our medical system, for which I nearly paid with my life. But my experience in Egyptian hospitals and with Egyptian doctors made me realise this even more. Why do our doctors behave as if they are being forced to be doctors; as if there is no minimum standard to which they must comply; as if they can do anything and get away with it; as if it was enough for them to just claim that they tried their best? The Egyptian hospital was replete with stories of Nigerians who come there to correct surgical operations that had been performed in Nigeria, some from glamorous hospitals in Abuja where they charge exorbitantly.
At the government hospital in which I was almost killed, a night’s stay in the ICU costs N150,000. I doubt that many hotels charge that much for a standard room. Yet, patients are still made to pay what they call “utility fees,” calculated by the number of days a patient has spent in the hospital. We are not even talking about the cost of medication and drugs. The same hospital sold Tavanic 500mg, an antibiotic used for the treatment of infections for N42,000, while a pharmacy located only a few metres away from the hospital sold the same drug for N20,000. In Egypt, we bought the drug for 124 Egyptian Pounds which is about N4,092, at the exchange rate of N33 to one. How did we find ourselves in a situation where government hospitals have become the most expensive and the most inefficient in Nigeria? Health workers, doctors, nurses, etc., in the private hospitals may not be any better, but at least they appear committed to their jobs. Public health workers in Nigeria behave as if they would rather be somewhere else, as if they are actually doing the patients a favour. The painful truth is that they don’t care whether you live or die. There is work here for everyone – the government, professional bodies and training institutions.
I was lucky to have powerful people who could muscle them. What about the millions of Nigerians who don’t know anybody? If I were in their situation, I would have long been forgotten. Why would a Nigerian need tonnes of money and powerful friends to stand a chance of surviving a medical challenge in our country?
My last words are for those of us whose work demands long sitting hours. We need to be mindful of our sitting postures and be sure to get up intermittently. Please don’t ignore any pain. Regular check up can make a difference between life and death. Today I am alive. I give thanks to the Almighty Allah who has given me a second lease of life out of his infinite mercy, not necessarily because I deserve it. All glory be to Him.
