1098 pills later
31 May 2024
“You have suffered total kidney collapse, I’m sorry.”
I never seem to panic.
I am fond of wearing a smirk-smile in moments when my life falls apart. Sometimes, I take it farther by making jokes. For years, I have learnt that forcing a laugh while you burn should be a key component of your coping mechanism. And like freshly torn pack of engine oil, deep breaths have always carried me through crazy situations.
When my friends — the new ones, mostly — ask me how I do it, I don’t tell them that it is something I picked up from years and years of facing heart-stopping moments without my heart ever learning how to stop. I don’t tell them that I learnt not to cry from watching my mother cry. I never say that I learnt not to worry from the times when my father’s other wife threatened her, and she would not even shed a sweat. I do not talk about staying calm when I lost a year between high school and university, because I did not make the cut-off mark for the course my father had chosen last minute. Or how I joked about becoming a farmer moments after the registrar said my name would be taken off the graduation list three days before my ceremony in university, because a course from my second year had not been recorded in my transcript. I don’t talk about my jobless years, my years in Abuja, or the year after that. Until now, only a few people know of the night I went to my friend’s place quietly, after officers of the air-force had locked me out of the apartment I lived in, because my landlord, an officer too, had crossed his superior and he was being punished. Or how that led to me quitting my new job in Lagos.
Sometimes, on what I assume to be a superficial level, I would talk about standing in the same hospital room, holding my father’s legs as his life slowly, silently, drifted out of his body. How I felt the vibration from his body become mute. How I then faced my mother to be her strength, and then my father’s family with my own strength. I sometimes speak, through wrecking anxiety and clenched-teeth, through the fear of being seen, of how this made me cold, strong, older by at least five years. Other times, when I had ears that were willing to listen, I talked of my days finding myself after that, lost in a world so familiar, yet so distant.
Before now, on rare occasions have I talked of the day I lost all my composure, preferring to speak with my fists before my lips, when father’s family threw my mother out of the house. And how again, I had to accept that life was a scripted lie: no fantasies nor fairy tales. I knew this was another end, and like every other end I had reached before, it was not enough to make me panic.
There are many things I never talk or talked about. I am fond of wearing this grey smile. And it seems perfect. It is never so bright, that you asked me why I was happy. Neither is it ever dark enough, that you would have to ask me why I was sad. I would smile through everything, so often, that I have this permanent little wrinkles on either side of my lips. Life forced emotions out of me, and since I learnt how to gaslight myself out of fear and madness, I never looked back.
And when the doctor, less than a month to my graduation from my master’s program, came up to my bed to say, “you have suffered Acute kidney Injury, leading to total failure,” I did not seem to panic. Even his emphasis on the rareness of this did not seem to shake me.
“What caused it?” I asked, with utter simplicity and quietness that he barely heard me. Almost as if I had resigned myself to this unknown madness. I thought back to three days before this question. There had been no indication that my kidneys were going to stop working. I had been ill some days before that, but not enough to get this verdict.
It was the day before my actual checkup at the hospital and something had fallen to the depth of my stomach that morning. In the hours that followed, my tongue crawled with distasteful blandness. My face, legs and pretty much all my body parts had swollen to at least twice their usual sizes. I felt a silence in my bladder and I had not peed for up to twelve hours. I knew I had seen worse, fought worse, but this was in no way familiar. Later that evening, I had vomited white and light fluids; been rushed through the automatic doors of the hospital; vomited more fluids: white first, and red later. Before the doctor showed up with the news, I had fallen and failed as a functioning system. I had died.
My smile spread with pretense and stillness. His words fell on my skin like gloss paint on unplastered brick: rough and unfitting. I wanted to tell him that it was impossible. That I was someone that had followed a strict home workout routine since 2014; seven years before I finally joined the gym consistently for a year. That I did everything possible to be healthy: food, sports, fitness and prayers. I didn’t get the chance to tell him these because my family already did. They told him when he had asked if I smoked, used hard drugs or abused over-the-counter drugs. My answer echoed theirs— No.
Fourteen days on that mechanical bed, being pushed in and out of rooms that were filled with bright lights and monitor beeps, being encouraged by the nurses, and being nurtured by loving hands only served to remind me of the gravity of what I had to endure.
So it was no surprise that I seemed like a madman when I laughed while I told my mother of how I had bled for hours in my sleep through the opening on my chest from my surgery. And how the nurse had told me in the morning that I was lucky to survive that. Mother nearly chided me for how I never took anything seriously. She had stopped herself from getting caught in pity for me. I told her to watch me act like I always did: with my chin up and shoulders held high. I knew that this too was one of those. And that, like those times, I would be back to myself again, no matter how many sunrises and sundowns it took.
31 May 2024, Exactly a hundred days since I walked out of the hospital, a thousand and ninety-eight individual pills later; months of learning to use my knees gently when walking down the stairs; gaining and losing weight from drugs; weeks of burning pains in every muscle group in my body; the headaches that were plague-like; the pains, the pains and the pains — and I still won’t panic.
I have had so many good reasons to not panic: family that held me together while I fell apart, a love that I found, and the many mundane activities of life that I added to my daily routines. In this time, I have become a master’s graduate, travelled to another city for two interviews, moved to that city for that job. And I have learnt to eat very early in the morning so I can function without pain or a relapse.
Today, I used my medications for the last time, and it felt like a joke. I find it hard to believe that I will spend two straight days without them. I find it hard to convince myself that I will be fine without them. I want to call my consultant and ask him if he’s certain that I should stop, I still have quite a number of them. I am not panicking. I am just a person that had gone through multiple dialysis to have a chance at life, and had to depend on drugs to keep my kidneys working. I am a man who has had to stay away from gym and playing football — I’ll leave out how much they mean to me — for over five months now, without a timeline for when I could return to them. I am a person who has experienced hell and a miracle. A curse and a prayer. Damnation and revival.
Through it all, barring a short disappearance on my main social media channels, I kept this from you. I posted pictures on Instagram when I could. Never missed a Snapchat streak. I called my mother and told her that I knew I would be fine. Because no matter what shade life had been colored in, it seemed to match my skin. And this end was only the beginning of my redemption.
Today, I told my family that I was done taking drugs, and they all celebrated. I told them that I was moving into my new apartment on the weekend. They all prayed for me. Their collective waves of joy became fuel in my veins. I looked back, and I looked forward, and I realized that I was living a fictional life, stuff of dreams, filled with drama, box-office plots and storylines.
Today, A thousand and ninety-eight pills later and, now more than ever, I am telling myself that I am going to be fine.
I will not panic.
for I have the hand of YHWH over my life, I will not fear.
