When Ahithophel of Goan, described by the Bible as one of the wisest men on earth, realized that his coup against King David using David’s rebellious son, Absalom, as the arrowhead had been frustrated by God and it was bound to fail, he left the Absalom fold to throttle himself to death (2 Samuel 16:15-23 and 2 Samuel 17:1-23). But before he could do so, he left three pieces of advice for his sons and others of his time. The first is that ‘’you should not seek to do evil against a Favourite of Fortune’’.
I am captivated by that Ahithophel phrase used in describing King David. And looking at my small but events-filled life, I have decided to appropriate it for myself: I am, without any doubt, ‘’a Favourite of Fortune’’.
Last week on this cyber space, I recounted two of eight incidences in my life so far that God has clearly saved me from instant death. The first was how some unruly young men took possession of a portion of a Federal highway in Adikpo, Benue State, and were bent on killing me, an innocent soul, for a crime I knew nothing about. They were protesting the electoral robbery of late Paul Unongo’s victory in the 2003 governorship election in Benue.
What nearly happened to me showed me that life is so cheap in Africa and especially in Nigeria. Unruly youth, drunk drivers, supposedly well-trained doctors and other healthcare professionals, witch doctors and their various accomplices, a lynch mob that can easily assemble when an accusation, whether true or false, is raised, armed robbers, anyone and anything can just snuff life out of anyone who is not a favourite of fortune such as I am in our country Nigeria. You could be alive this minute and the next one you are gone, just like that, from any number of numerous sources. How sad. To, therefore survive from any of them and be alive to be 63 in Nigeria is an achievement of no mean order.
From the urgings of some of my readers who reacted to my piece posted last week entitled ‘’Saved, Eight Times, From Instant Death’’, I will, today, Friday, 1st September, 2023, as a part of my birthday celebration, recount another incident of possible instant death in my life that God saved me from, as a testimony to his goodness to me and my election as an apple of his eyes.
Some time in May of the year 2005, through a routine check in hospital, I was diagnosed as having developed high blood pressure, the inherited disease of the Black race.
One day in that same month, I woke up from sleep and was feeling ‘’one kind’’, as we say it in Nigeria.
I had my bath and breakfast and decided to go to hospital. I was living alone then in Abuja without my wife and children. Two of my friends and the relatives staying with me in the house in Wuse Zone 4 had left for their work. There was, therefore, no one to tell that I was not feeling fine and would be visiting an hospital.
I drove myself to a high brow hospital in the Central Business District of Abuja which I will not disclose. I was assigned to be seen by a very young doctor. As they normally do in their usually terrible handwriting, the man started writing even before I had fully told him of my condition. I know that all doctors all over the world are like this but this one was unusually fast. This was ominous but I held my peace. I noticed that he betrayed some alarm when he saw the reading of my blood pressure. His betrayal increased my alarm.
Well, the man wrote furiously and stopped. He rang the door bell, summoning a nurse who appeared immediately. He recommended a drug that should be administered on me intravenously. As soon as the drug came into my system, I started seeing stars and was transformed into a state between living and death. I started noticing a flurry of activities around me. Doctors and nurses started coming in and out of the Injection Room where I was now resting on a bed. None of them was saying anything in my presence, but I knew that I had become an interesting case of concern to the doctors and nurses of that hospital that is why they were coming in and going out.
I noticed that my young doctor who writes extra furiously was the most concerned as he was wearing a most subdued looks. I knew he was being blamed for something he alone was possibly responsible in my rapidly deteriorating condition.
One miracle happened as I kept drifting into the foggy netherworld as if I was in a jet plane that was moving in a circle: I remembered to pray. I was saying repeatedly: ‘’I will not die but live’’. ‘’ I will not die but live to declare the good works of the Lord’’. ‘’I will not die but live to fulfill my mighty destiny’’. These lines of the same prayer became a sing-song even in that my sub-conscious state.
The second miracle happened: without any of the medics doing anything to restore me back to life, I started noticing a gradual restoration. Prayers, indeed, work. After a while, I went to sleep and woke up about two hours later feeling much better.
Then another miracle happened. Mrs. Mary Okeke, my wife’s older sister and now a retired nurse, had come to Abuja visiting from her Lagos base. She flew in that morning. She called to greet me and to inform me that she was in town only for me to tell her I was in hospital. She hurried to the health facility.
Olube, as I call her native name affectionately, is my favourite in-law, sister and friend rolled into one. Her visit cheered me up greatly and boosted my morale to live. I have also been taught that joy and rejoicing are essential Christian attitude to put up in order to gain favours from God so I was busy cracking jokes as my health was stabilizing and I noticed that the hospital people were becoming more relaxed and wearing faces of relief.
It was from Mrs. Okeke that I learnt what happened. One, our young, furious- writing doctor had recommended for me a drug that had been banned by the WHO. Why that particular drug was still on the shelves of that hospital beats my imagination. Two, even when it was in use, that drug is not supposed to be administered to a young man like me still active in repopulating the depleting world. The drug kills the biology of a man in mid life such as I then was. It was meant for men who were ‘’dead’’ in that aspect of life. Three, as a young doctor still under the canopy of a doctor-superior, he ought to have consulted and cleared from his superiors the drug he was recommending for me but he never did.
Whatever was the mistake of that young doctor and his hospital, God saved my life from certain instant death if it had not been in my spirit to pray. Whenever I remember this particular incident, I shudder because of the remarks that would have been made about me: ‘’he drove himself to hospital and came back home in a hearse as a corpse’’. I even think that the hospital would have done everything on earth for a cover-up. No one, except God, knew I had gone to that hospital that day. Surely, if I had died that day, my death would have attracted a media interest because the hospital would not have come up with a satisfactory, coherent story of my death.
On May 27, I checked everywhere around me here for the current version of the High Blood Pressure drugs I have been on since 2005 and could not find them. I there and then took a decision to exercise my faith and wait on God to heal me of that very inconveniencing and deadly affliction. Since then and now I have not taken any medication of any kind for any diseases. I live in robust health and took to praying as follows: ‘’Thank you, Lord, for healing me from HBP and freeing me from other diseases’’. I have testified in my church and to many others about this happy development.
But about a week or so ago, a strange discomfort came upon me. When I wake up in the morning and want to walk to the venue of our early morning church programme called Covenant Hour, I will experience shortness of breadth as if I am climbing a mountain. The ailment has grown steadily worse over the week reaching its peak today, which, strangely, is my 63rd birthday and which also coincides with the Covenant Day of Trumpets Service when the Church celebrates the beginning of a new month as recommended in the Bible (Numbers 11: 31).
I have applied some of the covenant mysteries taught by the Church such as the anointing oil and the communion but the affliction plays hide and seek with me. When it does as if it has finally gone, it stages a come back again to torment me.
I have told God that I cannot go back to my vomit: the stress and discomfort of suffering from HBP or any other diseases or ailments; the volume of money spent over the years on BP drugs; the slavery of constantly remembering that you have drugs to take; the care you must take to remember to take your drugs manufactured for high temperature users to temperate climates when you are traveling abroad and the sheer inconvenience of being a slave to illnesses and diseases are not things I can go back to if it is HBP that is not gone but has come back upon me as shortness of breadth as a result of a malfunctioning heart.
I also tell God that I cannot lose my confession, my testimony that I have been freed from HBP and other illnesses and diseases. I have told the whole world about it.
Well, I could barely walk this morning. But I made an irrevocable resolution: I will not go to hospital or seek any drugs again. I am no longer a hospital or chemist case. I ask God boldly that if it is HBP, is it not the same thing that a young doctor in a reputable hospital had nearly killed me over some 18 years ago? If God, Jehovah Rapha, cannot heal me of HBP or any other ailment, then let me die.
You my readers, watch over this my resolution. If I die, mourn me as a candidate of misguided faith. But if I live to be over a hundred years as I pray for and hope to do, then blow it on the trumpet that this man has lived because of his unshakable faith in God’s healing powers.
Meanwhile, celebrate with me my 63 years on this treacherous earth. I will live for many more years to be a celebrated survivor of conspiracies, plots and afflictions. Amen.
