Author: C. Bassey Usungise
Imprint: Lagos: May University Press Ltd., 2017
Reviewer: Chuks Oluigbo
Medical Tragedy in Nigeria: My Story is an account of the ugly experience of C. Bassey Usungise, the book’s author, during a health challenge in Nigeria and how a surgeon’s carelessness worsened an already bad situation and nearly ruined the author’s life.
Here is the story in brief: The author had an itch on his left leg. He scratched it until he scraped his skin and developed a wound. The wound became infected after some days, accompanied by a limp and a severe pain. He went to a hospital where the doctor, after series of scans, found the wound was infected and administered antibiotics, which healed the swelling and the limping. But by then, another problem had developed – the right leg had borne the weight of the entire body for a while leading to a severe pain on the right waist, making it impossible for the author to stand upright.
One night, he took a leap of faith. While his wife was busy with household chores, he attempted to forcefully stand upright against his wife’s sound advice. That attempt aggravated the whole situation. He found himself in a costly ward in one of the country’s popular hospitals with an admission fee of N50,000. After physical examination by a team of doctors, he was discharged and told to attend treatment as an outpatient, even though he was still in pain.
Not satisfied, he made contacts and eventually ended up in the hands of Dr Charles Kimani, whom he later describes as “a monster”. It was Dr Kimani’s treatment that aggravated his situation, got him bedridden for months and incapacitated for more than a year.
Why Dr Kimani insisted on a second surgery after a successful first surgery which healed the pain in his right leg is still a mystery. But while he was waiting to be discharged after the first surgery, Dr Kimani suddenly came up with the tale of a broken drain that needed to be removed and replaced through a minor, 30-minute surgery. In the course of the purported 30-minute surgery that ended up lasting over six hours, so many unusual things happened. As the author would later learn, Dr Kimani had cut deeper into his spinal cord and tampered with his nerves after which he had told other doctors that Bassey would never be able to stand up even after three years. Some doctors and nurses in the hospital also told the author how he fell down from the operating table in the theatre, an occurrence they said was abnormal because it was practically impossible unless it was manipulated by an external force. That external force was explained by a woman who described the fall as “occultist donation” or “medical taboo” where the victim is given just three days to live in the world.
Before the two surgeries, the author says, he could walk unassisted to the lavatory, but after the surgeries, especially the second, he could not stand up again. (p.37)
Besides, he suffered other abnormal conditions: urinary incontinence, tightening of the right ankle, looseness of erection, frequency of defecation, etc. (p.46)
As he would later learn, Dr Kimani was not even a neurosurgeon but a trauma surgeon who was not qualified to handle spinal cord surgeries. (p.51)
Having survived Dr Kimani’s wickedness and escaped death by the whiskers, the author’s final saving grace came through a corrective surgery in India, which was funded through magnanimous donations by friends, well-wishers, church members and fellow ministers. India has for long been a top destination for outbound medical tourism in Nigeria, accounting for a whopping 47 percent.
The author speaks well of Saifee Hospital in Mumbai, India, where he received his healing. He says, “The Saifee Hospital was built with the cutting-edge technology; it is a state-of-the-art hospital lacking nothing that a patient may need. The hospital is like a five-star hotel.” (p.70)
And the staff? “The nurses in the hospital respond to patients’ calls with alacrity. They are always on hand to attend to your needs.” (p.69)
This is food for thought for most Nigerian hospitals where the chances of dying are higher than those of walking out alive and where the antagonism of medical personnel can kill even faster than the illness. Nigeria has a lot to learn from India. And this is one of the reasons for writing this book, as stated by the author in the Introduction: “so that medical practitioners can satisfy the expectations of their patients, and so that governments at the federal and state levels can build state-of-the-art hospitals and equip them with cutting-edge technology to make medical services available to every Nigerian from all walks of life”.
The book further tries to foster faith in believers, eliminate fears in them and encourage them to be strong even in the face of challenges. It creates awareness of the supremacy of God’s power over the powers of darkness, celebrates the power and wonders of God and His faithfulness, and also demonstrates that only in God “can we find ultimate security and safety”.
Against the prediction of surgeons, God raised the author from the sickbed. “They had said I was not going to survive the sickness, but God’s power delivered me, to the absolute chagrin of the powers of darkness and to the astonishment of the doctors who were treating me at the hospital,” he says.
Beyond sharing the author’s experience, the book is also a call to repentance. The author, a minister in Deeper Life Bible Church, seizes the opportunity to preach the gospel of salvation, calling on those who are still outside Christ to surrender their lives to Him as the “only sure way to heaven” and “the guaranteed way to security from powers of darkness”.
He admonishes, “If you are just a churchgoer who relies on almsgiving and paying of tithes without repenting from all your known sins, I think it is high time you called religion quits because you are naked before the powers of darkness. The antidote against satanic power is the salvation gotten from Christ; stop playing churchianity and accept Jesus today as your personal Lord and Saviour. Start living a life above reproach, defeat sin, and you will see God’s power work miracles in your life.” (p.26)
Interestingly, unlike many of today’s Christians who like to blame all their problems on demonic attacks without admitting their own error, the author admits, honestly, that the beginning of the whole saga was his own little mistake of taking his personal hygiene for granted.
“If I had applied any steriliser or disinfectant to the wound I sustained on my left ankle through scratching, the infection that set in later on could have been warded off, and there would have been no need for the swelling and limping that cropped up later in my body,” he says. (p.3)
He, therefore, admonishes believers and non-believers alike to take their personal hygiene and first aid treatment very seriously.
Even though the title of the seven-chapter book, Medical Tragedy in Nigeria: My Story, may tend to generalise and so sound alarmist and scary, the author clarifies ab initio, clearly stating that the book is not written “to make the reader paranoid about hospitals or medical professionals”. Of course, as he rightly admits, while there are medical practitioners who perpetrate dastardly acts of injury and worsen the medical conditions of their patients; while “many a patient has been maimed for life due to some medical practitioners who are greenhorns in the profession”; and while “many patients have died avoidable deaths due to the occult practices of some medical practitioners who wanted to satisfy their occultist covenants”, there are still many good doctors all over the world doing marvellous jobs of caring and curing their patients and giving them hope.
But despite all he had to go through, the author in the end demonstrates the true Christian spirit as enunciated by Christ in Matthew 5:44 – “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” He says of Dr Kimani, who caused him so much pain and endangered his life: “He has apologised to me”; “I have forgiven him with all my heart”; “I pray that he will find Jesus as his personal Saviour and Lord through repentance of his sins.” I hope we can all say Amen to that.
