Today, for the first time, I want to write about an experience that left me broken for a long time. It is a story of loss and love sandwiched in horrible memories of pain.
I hate to recall the events that followed because they remind me of a brother, a friend, a husband, a graduate and a father who fought cancer with a smiling face on a hospital bed to his last breath.
I don’t want to mention his name because doing so will bring me more pain, fresh like it is the beginning but I want to make him feel that he is loved and he will be remembered for as long as we live.
It was just March 2023 (I cursed all the months that followed after) when he started feeling sick and there, he had to go from one hospital to another in Juba with one reason, to feel better again. If there is one thing he wasn’t so sure about, it was the fact this will not end in Juba but will take him to Egypt and he must accept all the outcomes, good or bad.
With his young wife, in the month of April 2023, they travelled to Cairo, Egypt. The wife had to leave everything behind, her little daughter, job and school to be with her husband through the process. (Blessed are men who are married to wives, not women) Of course, every man longs for that one day, where they can prove if they are married to the right woman or the wrong one and that for him was one of those moments. (His was different, because he didn’t live to tell his wife that he was proud of her) I would tell him today; wherever he is that he was a lucky man. To every caring woman outside there, I love you all.
I was already in Cairo, having gone there for my own reasons when they came. I don’t want to talk about what took me to Egypt in the first place, maybe next time. When they joined me there, we became a good family just within a week. We would laugh, dine together and pray every evening before bed. I have never been a good prayer warrior in my life but I knew we have got a lot of reasons to pray anytime and also a lot of reasons to be thankful for everything and prayer was the only way to do that.
Everything was well in the first, second and third week but in the fourth week, things changed for the worse and for weeks or months that followed, they were not better again. We went, on that day, to the hospital to pick his medical results. They were not only bad. They were heartbreaking. He was diagnosed with Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, a rare type of blood cancer that affects the bone marrow.
It was the first time I noticed sadness on his face and his young wife. Imagine coming from far, leaving completely nothing behind, to get this diagnosis? I was sad and felt broken but never wanted to show any sign of it because in times as bad as that one, it helps to fake being strong even when you are not.
We never spoke to each other that day because, firstly, those were not the results anyone among us was expecting and secondly, there was nothing good to talk about. We thought it was going to be something like an enlargement of the spleen, something that we can manage and not cancer. Hell no! I have never been to a medical school but one thing I know is that cancer has a very bad prognosis, according to my own studies. They too had done their own studies online.
We tried our very best to remain in continual denial of this harsh reality but the more we pretended to deny it, the more visible it became. My brother was a fighter and he lived most of his life with one goal, to be a successful young man and that is what every father or mother wants; to see your child succeed and succeed exceedingly. He was the first person in his family to graduate from college. He knew that he was going to make it but he has never seen anything like this one coming, sickness. It got me thinking; we have a lot of plans in life. We set out to do a lot of things. We succeed and many times, we fail but I think, from looking at that moment, I realized that there are moments that change everything and the time we spent in the hospital is not exceptional.
In difficult moments, there is always hope. We tried to be hopeful that things will get better and it worked but it was not long enough. The cancer got to his brain and almost paralyzed his right hand. He could barely move his hand and we thought it was a sign of a stroke but we were wrong, it was something else, a lesion on his brain. The only option was brain surgery. You know how delicate that can be, to have surgery done on your brain. We were afraid but he made us stronger, that all will be well.
In sickness, there are times where you can see signs of recovery, during those times, those who care for the patient feel like they have been released from prison. You go back to being happy again but there are times of remission where you see the symptoms again. The increased white blood cell, blood pressure and a day in the ICU. The chemotherapy or radiation therapy and how the little hopes you have managed to accumulate are swiftly taken away, just in split seconds.
But in front of all odds, he remained stronger to his last minutes. He managed to keep smiling even when it was not easy. He was grateful for all the people including the family that showed him love and kindness during his down moments. He was thankful for a life well lived, choices made when he was alive and days that shaped his life. He was a good young man who was about to make a good life for himself, his family and his country. As he continues to rest in peace, I want to make it clear that he is forever in our hearts. To every man, woman who has been there, from the beginning to the end, may God bless you.