Good pharma
The cocktail of bacteria-zapping drugs created a mental edifice in my head this night. I thought after two nights of no sleep I would be off like a torpedo into the realm of hypnos. Instead, my thoughts returned to the myriad complex subtleties of the world. Its funny how when you are quite ill, the world shuts itself down and you become absorbed with the solitary orb of suffering.
Then, when you are recuperating, there is a wonderful aperture back onto the world that opens up: you remember new stories about to unfold for the ones you love, the sensations of the body that are not pain-based, the technicolour depth of memories and all the spaces that thread themselves across and betwixt in the lifeworld you have created. The lucidity of my thoughts propelled me to get up and start writing about returning to the world again. Western minds had lost a rich concept of the world (die Welt) until Husserl and then Heidegger excavated the site and uncovered rich profundities of experience; as rich as an Italian vine that has been burrowing into the soil since the Romans:
"Celebration ... is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder -- the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know this." Martin Heidegger
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7 comments:
There is only one health, and that is to be present to one's isness.
Welcome back, my friend.
Ok J, now you are beginning to sound delirious. Time to jet out of Naija for a sabbatical of 1 year or so back home, recuperate and contemplate whether your excitement at living in my homeland is worth all this ill health. You seem to bounce from one bout of sickness to the next. Your body, mind and soul deserves the best you can give it and Africa is not doing you any good. Better to be well and cold in UK than fragile in Naija!!
"Go back home"?
His home is Abuja.
st antonym where were you when jeremy was down? Welcome back as well.
Exactly! St. Antonym,
Jeremy is probably more at home, homely and ensconced in Nigeria - even so - happy and contented to be in Nigeria regardless of the bouts of illness or scrapes with security than many of us who shout the loudest for Nigeria and live abroad.
I have no problems whatsoever with that, many a comment have I made about the Dutch and their society that some even say I should return to the UK.
Just because I have emigrated somewhere it should not dampen my powers of observation and ability to comment on issues as they affect me or the people I see everyday.
Something that Jeremy does quite well.
I would earn brick-bats for this; but I have yet to find someone who articulates issues about Nigeria the way Jeremy does to excite the varied commentary that ensues.
Jeremy does really live and work in Abuja including having a beautiful Nigerian wife and I am happy there is a perspective to things not mired in "My homeland" speak.
J - glad you're back in the clear(ing). You dangled typhoid at me and I'd been crusing the WHO Model Formulary ready to advise you on treatment (cipro, by the way). I was going to send you some healing music - music being the healing force of the universe. But you're already racing ahead. I'll send it anyway, my friend.
All this stuff on health and our male health seeking behavious. I was sitting on a hospital bed waiting for back surgery on Monday, which was cancelled at the very last minute due to an over run on the consultant's list. Although this will screw things up for me (limiting the horizons of worldly potentiality to a shuffle to and from the paper shop), all I could think about at that moment was that my bodily integrity was still intact, impenertrable ... whole. Having an operation was making me feel a little bit like an old car that a burly mechanic would all to nonchalantly pull faulty parts from.
The cutting (and inevitable suture) will come will come at some point though. Paradoxically, through it I'll regain something of myself - the ability to move and to dance, the world will open itself up again. Strange then, the moment of relief that I felt when I was told that the operation wouldn't go ahead late on Monday afternoon.
One last health thing. It's estimated that 70% - 80% of injections are unnecessary in some countries (people like injections because the symbolise 'health' and doctors like them because they usually charge more). Oral administration of the same drug is often an option, cheaper and runs none of the health risks of non-sterile injection. Worth checking if you can pop the pills - although not such a good excuse to drop your trousers
Saul
PS: sorry for the bad Martin H pun
PPS - the Nigerian nurse in hospital (in London) was intrigued by 'my friends living in Abuja' (she's from Nigeria). I won't start on about health worker migration .... another time
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