Doctor without glasses

The month has come to an end and everybody is giving himself a treat and you are

there saying if you get enough money, you will enjoy. There is nothing like

enough money o. However small, enjoy a percentage by giving yourself a treat

like eating jollof mixed with okro soup and wele in inside the tin. Eat well and stop that ‘Kontonmire gives blood’ highlife song.

It’s a poverty song put on our lips; manual cars are more luxurious than automatic cars? Do you see the ideas poverty can give you? These are the consolation songs poverty can use to play tricks on our minds. Who cares if eating pizza once in a while gives you cholesterol?

All are songs of poverty talk! In the second week of the month, the long queues at Adabraka and Osu for gari and beans have created shorter or no queues at fried rice joints all because the purchasing power around the second week of the month is on low battery. People will not say it; they would prefer to say fried rice gives cholesterol. We know already! Don’t mind me o, that’s just a decoy to cover up dry pockets!

I hope you know that nowadays the most common suspect anytime one reports an eye

problem to the eye specialist is glaucoma! Looks like apolo is in the air, or?

My daughter’s eyes started itching with some discharges similar to apolo two weeks ago. I called my medical doctor friend, for advice. Professional as he has always been, his advice was for me to send her to the nearest hospital for a proper diagnosis.

Indeed, after she had been given some eye drops, it improved for only 3 days and

resurfaced. Quite worried, I called my friend again and told him I would hate the situation where my daughter may be made to wear spectacles as young as she is even though I started wearing glasses only a few years ago though I often see clearer when I take it off – the irony of an Ayigbeman like me using lens!

These my hometown people like to do the opposites of things. My cousin, Bright is still writing remedial! He always failed Mathematics to the extent even last year that he didn’t register to write it at all, results still came and your guess is as good as mine – ‘F’! Bright? Hmmm! He is a veteran of failing and has a master's degree in it.

Yeso, where was I? Ahan, the Doctor then referred me to James 1:2 in the Bible in a paraphrase that I should consider myself fortunate if my daughter has to wear glasses at an early age and that it would be a sign of good omen. How? He

explained, in jest, that haven’t I noticed that most children especially girls who wear glasses in their formative years are super good in the sciences and eventually become medical doctors?

Somehow, I agreed with him because anytime I go to the hospital to see a doctor and he or she is not wearing glasses, I feel some way!

A medical doctor without spectacles, is that one too a doctor? Ah! I have been wondering how one can successfully pass the following medical subjects if he or she doesn’t wear glasses early in life. Just see: hygiene toxicology, nucleosynthesis, otolaryngology, ophthalmic specialty, human anatomy, histology (as for this one even I can pass because it sounds like History), embryology, pathogenic orgasm or is it a pathogenic organism, pathophysiology, pathology, forensic medicine, pharmacognosy, neurology, molecular biology, pediatrics, dermatology, and venereology!

Ebei! Abeg, don’t worry when your child has an eye problem now and has to wear glasses – he or she will become a medical doctor or a scientist, all things being equal!

I am still wondering why someone will spend seven years at the university to study how to remove a decayed tooth. Even boxers and trotro mates can do that in a few bouts. Just wondering o, I am not saying eyi! When we were in school, girls especially those who wore glasses were assumed to be science-bias and were very intelligent but I had one classmate at Anunmle Primary School. Grace? Chai!

She wore glasses and looked very serious but academically, puin! I still wonder which hospital prescribed those glasses for her! I don’t know why but I used to fear girls who were science-bias especially those in the pure and/or physical or engineering sciences.

Women in the sciences are quite common nowadays even those without glasses! I

still remember that lady in my MBA class over a decade ago who could tell a

whole Quantitative Professor that the question he had set on the board was wrong all because of her background as a first-degree holder in civil engineering. Me? How am I supposed to tell a wrong quantitative question from the right one? I was only looking at them (she and the Professor) like that but without understanding anything!

Anyway, it still amazes me that almost all medical laboratories that one would visit in town nowadays to do malaria tests give NEGATIVE results even though all the symptoms point to malaria. What’s happening? Is malaria no longer in Ghana or the lab equipment and reagents can no longer recognize the parasites? Ahh! Test after test, yet the results are constantly negative.

Nothing annoys me more than the ‘ashorrla’ they do at the lab for these tests. The same way the mosquitoes suck our blood is the same way the lab guys do it. So who is guiltier about malaria offenses – the one who sucks with the motive of giving malaria or the one who sucks to see that motive crystalise and gets a negative result?

After checking for malaria which I can prophesy would prove negative, they would

now ask you to go and do blood sugar, blood pepper, blood ginger tests, and ‘whine whine’ tests! Why?

Many of us go to the hospital having foreknowledge of the disease. ‘Doc, I am

sure I have malaria; just give me coartem and I will be fine. Me, I do this many times too just to avoid being asked to go to the lab especially if it has to be that test that I dread so much to know my ‘status on wassap’! That test that gives you sleepless nights till you get the final results! Kai! After all, man must die of something! I hate going to the hospitals because of injections that is the reason I abuse some The Counter or ‘draw’ store’ medications many of which have side effects that can create serious problems for my liver! Liver problems are damn serious o, people!

Don’t be careful o, yoo! When diagnosed, that is when you would realize that

every single second of good health is a lot of money! Go on drinking ‘bitters’

without urinating and taking painkillers by ‘hat’!

If not for the fact that they sacked me from medical school because I didn’t like seeing blood, I would have been a gynecologist by now. It’s the only medical specialty that pays you twice your salary…one in cash and the other one, in kind…free show and license to see and touch with or without spectacles!

Have a great weekend and remember weekends are for funerals and weddings. I

would choose to attend a funeral of old people rather than a wedding though. This resolution was made after I realized I had to attend Kofi’s weddings 3 times. Kofi alone o, 3! He didn’t know that in marriage, a man needs to have two hearts – one that will absorb absurd things and the other heart is for breathing.

How many years do we have on earth that every time, it is only Kofi who has a problem with his spouse and keeps jumping from one marriage to another and ending it so quickly too? Kofi gets heart! We all have problems o, yooo!

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