Gashua, Who Will Save You? -By Hamza Muhammad Tasiu

I want to start with a powerful word: Kafkaesque! The meaning? It is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begin to fall to pieces. You find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course, you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.

This definition was given by Frederick R. Karl. Kafkaesque comes from the name of the German author, Franz Kafka. The word perfectly describes the cases of most kidney failure patients. The disease starts with back pain, then people go for diagnosis, and dialysis follows (Thank God it is free for Yobe indigenes). Swelling in arms and legs, shortness of breath, hiccups, and then comes the expected: slow and painful death. These are some of the things patients go through.

But what is kidney failure? Kidney failure is a condition in which the kidneys lose the ability to remove waste and balance fluids. In other words, the kidneys have failed. Ordinarily, kidney failure should not be a death sentence. Dr. Ibrahim Sulaiman told us that a person can survive on 25% of his total nephrons, the kidney cells. That’s, you only need half of one kidney to survive. But for most people, being diagnosed with one kidney failure is like being issued an indirect death certificate.

For most patients diagnosed with kidney disease, they put everything they can into the fight against the disease, but they they stand any chance in most of the cases. And as the word says, ‘You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course, you don’t stand a chance.’ Gashua has the highest number of cases of kidney failure in the whole of Yobe State. You could go to the dialysis unit in Yobe State Teaching Hospital and look at a kidney failure patient and ask him, ‘Are you from Gashua?’ The most probable answer? ‘Yes!’ L

As we speak today, hundreds of families are at the mercy of this disease. May we, the healthy ones, be protected from it. We also pray that this crisis comes to an end soon. My attempts for writing this piece are: one, that we may get someone (individuals, NGOs, governments, etc) who will come to our aid and two, to relieve the pain in my heart. As Neil Gaiman said, ‘Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved.’

Hamza Muhammad Tasiu