By Jerry Okungu
Nairobi, KENYA
For the readers who follow this column, let me apologize profusely for having let you down last week. On the Monday after I had been admitted to this hospital, I was busy being ferried across the city from one lab to another in rickety matatus masquerading as ambulances. Apart from the discomfort, one got the impression that the only sane persons I had on these trips were the nurses that accompanied me. For the ambulance drivers, one could be forgiven for thinking that they were graduates from a matatu driving school. To a passenger like me, they could very well assume I was a bag of potatoes or sack of cabbages to be delivered to an open air market in Nairobi’s Eastlands at breakneck speed.
Being in hospital is like being in prison. You get the uniform that resembles those ones won by prison inmates except for the colour difference. Otherwise collar and shape designs are the same.
The other reason prison is a twin brother of a hospital ward is the nature of restriction of movements of patients. When patients with serious conditions are in bed, nurses, doctors, administrators , security guards and even cooks and cleaners keep a keen watch over them on 24 hour basis. They leave nothing to chance. More visibly if they are on drips, blood transfusion or dialysis, they are chained to their beds wherever they may be.
Just like a criminal in prison ward, there is a chain of command upside down. Doctors give directives to the technical staff and these directives must be obeyed to the letter even if they are unreasonable to the patient.
The reason I’m writing this article is because I would strongly advise my friends and family members to avoid the mistakes I made. I had thought I was one of the healthiest Kenyans; drank tea with lemon without sugar; hardly ate salty and fatty stuff. I was careful which cooking oil was used in my house and bought all the advertized healthy products I could lay my hands on. I never went for regular tests for anything except HIV. In fact I only knew about prostate cancer when professor Nyongo’ started talking about his condition.
The prize you pay for failing to go for regular check up on a regular basis is shock and devastation. Unless you get strong family members and trusted friends that encourage rather than start planning your demise; it is difficult to survive the attack even with the best of intentions. It is the reason I must repeat even if it is the umpteenth time that we have to embrace the culture of routine medical examination for all manner of terminal illnesses.
Since writing my first article on this subject, I have received overwhelming responses from home and abroad.
I have received encouragement from people as far as Canada, USA, Uganda and South Africa apart from my country Kenya marveling at my courage to go public and help fellow human beings all over the globe to stop living in denial under similar circumstances. More so, a number of them have directed me to advanced cancer centers abroad that can deal with my case without going through radio and chemotherapies. I will be discussing with my doctors information from these sources,
The instruction was simple- if I moved, wriggled or changed position, the machine would stop and start all over again. The charming girl who prepared me for the MRI ordeal informed me that I would feel no pain but I would hear at least 40 different sounds during the entire procedure.
The first trip to Aga Khan Hospital for the bone imaging was interesting in more ways than one. My nurse and doctors at MP Shah had assumed the procedure would last thirty minutes. They were wrong. All I got was an intravenous injection to prepare me for bone scanning. We were then asked to go back after three hours. We ended up in my hospital bed for all those hours. Our 12 0’clock appointment with the bone scanner ended up starting at 1.20 pm after I had fallen asleep on my stretcher and ended at 2pm.
Biopsy and dialysis incisions were probably the most painful of all. These were done at my hospital. Shooting nearly 10 needles without anesthesia through my rectum to extract cancer tissues was like going through circumcision ceremony or worse.
When cancer attacks, the victim should do a quick survey to locate competent and tested medical specialists in that area. Along with that the hospital type is just as important as the specialists. Treating cancer requires multiple disciplines depending on the level and type of the malignant. It will require a lead urologist surgeon, a kidney specialist, an oncologist, a nutritionist and even a physiotherapist, all working in tandem.
In my case, my lead surgeon was brutally honest with me from the first time we met. He chose not to promise heaven and deliver hell. He told me that the infection had reached a very high level with PSA measuring 817 instead of the maximum 4. Then my blood count was almost nil- about 1.5 instead of a minimum of four. Coupled with my loss of appetite, I became anemic, weak and tired resulting in my losing 22 kg in just three months.
Because of these deficiencies, he chose to deal with consequences of cancer, arrest their spread and help me regain strength before attacking the cells directly. For this reason I’m still at the stage of blood cleansing, kidney restoration and feeding program in my ward at MP Shah Hospital.
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