Omoruyi Journeys Back to Life
Omo Omoruyi, erudite professor of Political Science, consummate politician, impressive policy maker and an astute defender of democracy, after about 40 years of public service finds himself on self exile. He survives an assassination attempt amidst the crisis that follows the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election adjudged to be the freest, fairest […]
Omo Omoruyi, erudite professor of Political Science, consummate politician, impressive policy maker and an astute defender of democracy, after about 40 years of public service finds himself on self exile. He survives an assassination attempt amidst the crisis that follows the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election adjudged to be the freest, fairest and most credible election in the annals of Nigeria’s electoral history. Apparently no longer wanted at home by the prevailing power holders, Omoruyi goes abroad in 1994 to engage his first love: teaching and research. He returns in 2007 to his second love: partisan politics, an act which he intends to reform by introducing “the idea of consultancy driven campaign” into the nation’s electioneering regime.
After a false start with his friend and policy school classmate, Gen. Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, he finally makes an inroad with the campaign of Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole. He is at the verge of growing his new reform agenda for the deepening of the nation’s democracy when tragedy strikes. About a year after the 2007 elections, Omoruyi prepares to set up his political consultancy completely oblivious of what fate has in stock for him. “This firm was in the process of making its expertise known to Nigeria when I was knocked down by what is described as a life threatening ailment also called a ‘death sentence’ called, cancer,” he says.
The diagnosis of this ailment, its treatment, the prognosis and life thereafter are the preoccupation of the author in this book that is divided into 13 chapters of simple and flowing English in spite of the fact that it deals with a complex medical condition that involves the use of medical and other scientific terms. As he puts it in the preface, his mission is to render “an account of my ordeal that commenced in the late 2007… it is my experience as a cancer patient starting from the National Hospital, Abuja to the Boston Medical Center and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute also in Boston, affiliates of Boston University Medical School and Harvard University Medical School respectively.” Is this the only mission of the author? Did he succeed?
The answer to the first question is no, because it appears that in Chapter 10: Fear of Recurrence, he sets the objective of using himself as a point of hope for other cancer sufferers that the ailment like AIDS is not an instant death sentence if it is detected early and treated adequately. According to him, “This is also my goal as a cancer survivor to join other Nigerians advocating for early detection.” As for the second question, I would say yes. After My Life in Perspective, Chapter 1, where he tries to clarify his background and proposes how he would want to be remembered, he immediately in the succeeding Chapter 2, From Abuja to Boston, renders the beginning of his journey back to life. For him, by February 21 when he presented himself for medical examination of his ailment at the nation’s elite hospital, the National Hospital, Abuja he was on the brink of death. His return to life only started when he got to Boston five days after where his medical condition was diagnosed as category-4 metastatic prostate cancer. In the succeeding Chapters 3, Cancer What? 4, Treatment Options; and 5, Chemotherapy, Port and New Treatment Plan, he takes us through the diagnosis and treatment.
The author uses these five chapters to achieve his primary purpose of accounting for his experience as a cancer patient under diagnosis and treatment. For those who do not understand, these chapters would be a guide to what cancer sufferers go through. But the author does more. He uses these early chapters to call attention to the worrisome state of Nigeria’s healthcare system and contrast it with the efficiency of a developed World like the United States of America. Specifically in From Abuja to Boston, he graphically illustrates the laxity in the nation’s healthcare sector, the laise faire attitude to work, the unkindness of health workers, inappropriate data sourcing and base, improper patient handling and wrong diagnosis. He captures the lack of equipment and their mishandling where they exist. The worst of all: he demonstrates the total lack of confidence in the system by senior government officials whose responsibility it is to fix the health sector. Otherwise how come a director in the Health ministry advised him to seek medical help elsewhere even as the author was at the nation’s elite hospital?
The author uses the last eight chapters to achieve his secondary purpose of giving hope to those living with cancer that contrary to the general claim that cancer is an instant death sentence, appropriate treatment regime, continuing advancement in science, and the will to survive could see them through. For instance, in Matters Arising from Chemotherapy, Chapter 5, and Rehabilitation, Chapter 6, he demonstrates how advancement in medical science research helped him to survive the ailment. Though tough, he survived. As the traditional treatment plan fails, the next option becomes the use of clinical trial drugs. However, he warns against its danger, saying from his experience, it is open to abuse. The concluding chapters, particularly, Prognosis, Chapter 9, and Fear of Recurrence, Chapter 10, seek to blow the myth of the irreversibility of death for a cancer patient. Although he is tentative in his conclusions, he emphasizes that with the right attitude, including faith in God and the will to survive there is hope for survival.
One theme that runs through the book is the author’s fervent faith in God as his healer. “In God I trust” he says in several parts of his account. The obsession with spirituality to explain his present condition may question his claim to survival. As a professor of political science, a social science discipline that has a similar research methodology with the exact sciences, he would have been expected to give more credit to the advancement in medical science than he has given. After all, when the traditional treatment plans failed after the first two surgeries and radiation sessions, it was chemo and the clinical trial drugs that came to his rescue and wiped off the cancer cells.
Perhaps the author should be excused for his absolute faith in God as his healer. Here is a man who could not walk by February 27, 2008. Almost a year later, February 9, 2009 after the failure of traditional treatment regime he was told in plain terms to prepare for death. In all of these, his nuclear family was not there for him; in fact, it not only abandoned the author but also practically disowned him. Then a year later, after three surgeries and 10 radiation and 12 chemo sessions, he was told to go home and live. If his medical oncologist was so bewildered that she called him a miracle patient, what should we expect him to think of his astonishing return to life from the brink of death?
In any case, the author’s appeal in the concluding chapter, Progress, for better management of cancer patients, improvement of social services available to them as well as improving their quality of life should indicate the clarity of his thought that if he is a miracle case, others should have a more certain chance of survival. This is precisely why he advocates a Survivorship Care Programme, which would encourage cancer survivors to come together periodically and exchange views under the guidance of experts on how to improve the quality of their life style.
The book’s simplicity of language is however diluted by a couple of errors of punctuation in several pages, which are clearly the handiwork of the devil in the printer’s machine. The book will, therefore, benefit from a proof reading review to clean up these errors, including a factual defect on page 195 where the author thanked among others “the late President, Commander-in-Chief, Alhaji Umaru Shehu Yar’adua.” The late president was Umaru Musa Yar’adua. Shehu was his older brother, who served as the Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters and second in command to Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo from 1976 to 1979.
My Journey Back to Life in telling the story of the crippled that walked again gives hope to the hopeless. It is a useful guide to cancer patients and survivors on how to manage their conditions. Their loved ones who also see cancer as an instant death sentence would also learn that this is no longer so and that what their ailing relation needs is love and care in their trying moment.
Adebiyi is Special Assistant to the President on Media, Aso Rock Villa, Abuja