I took away with me a major lesson from my meeting with Daddy G.O. during my 31st December, 2020, meeting with him. I was convinced that God wanted me to let go of worrying. This, I believed, included having to worry so much about my “business” and career. I needed to focus more on the work of the kingdom. He wanted me to serve Him without any restraint. He wanted everything concerning my personal aspiration to be in the backseat. I agreed.
I have always been an active worker in God’s kingdom, home or abroad. I am passionate about church planting and the productivity of Pastors. Nothing else really gives me more joy apart from serving the Lord in various capacities. So, when Daddy G.O, the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God told me God wanted to prove that He loved me and needed me to focus fully on Him, I understood the message.
Incidentally, a few days earlier that December, my wife and I decided to spend and be spent for God. In faith we sowed almost all our savings and earnings for the year on the Church programme we held to celebrate God’s faithfulness. My wife and I have unshakeable faith in God’s power and capacity to fulfil His words towards us.
My faith has always been one of my strongest points. From the onset of the kidney failure, I believed strongly that God was going to heal me completely.
Against the advice of my doctors, I decided against starting dialysis immediately after I was diagnosed.
“Why?” My doctor asked me.
“Because God is healing me.” I replied with faith.
And it was true.
At the point I was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, my eGFR level was as low as 2. The eGFR is a test of the kidney’s ability to filter waste from the blood. A low eGFR meant kidney failure.
A few weeks later when I repeated the test, it had shot up to 21. God was doing wonders with my health and I was not about to interfere. God wanted to prove to me that He would sustain me and there was no way He was going to do that if I died. So, I kept my faith and believed I was going to pull through.
By January 2021, however, my eGFR which had hit 22, started dropping, raising brows as concern. In February, I got a call from my doctor.
“Are you still obstinate about starting dialysis?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“If you refuse to be convinced otherwise, we may be constrained not to attend to you again. It is not professional to keep seeing a patient who refuses to abide by critical medical counsel and prescriptions.”
“Why?” I was stunned.
“Because you’re putting our practice at risk,” he said. “You have been diagnosed since October, this is February and you are yet to start dialysis. If anything bad happens to you, it’s our reputation that will be at stake.”
I understood where he was coming from. The type of patients most doctors dislike are the ones who totally refuse to listen to medical advice. I felt a bit pressured. These were people I had to see every week and I couldn’t start all over again if they decide to turn me away.
“Even if you’re not going to start dialysis, at least let us start the process in case it’s needed in emergency,” he said quietly. “We need to insert a central line catheter for access in the event of an emergency that requires dialysis at short notice.
A battle warred within me. My faith and my doctor’s advice.
I finally agreed to start the process. My decision satisfied my doctors and they fixed the procedure for April.
Before the procedure started, I was briefed on what to expect. They were going to insert a catheter in my system and the procedure was going to take at most, 45 minutes.
Something that stuck in my head as I watched them prepare for the procedure was the overly-clean, overly-bleached smell of the hospital. It took me back in time to the first time I had cause to visit a hospital.
This was in 1972 and I had just watched a boy I used to play with, Siji, fall from the balcony of our two-storey multiple single room units building. I was on the ground floor discussing options for lunch and dinner with my mother when we heard loud shouts and the dull thud of a body hitting the ground.
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