A popular Nigerian comic actor Charles Inojie has narrated his sweet-bitter encounter with ailing John Okafor a.k.a Mr Ibu on his sickbed, describing him as “an indomitable hurmourist.”
Mr Ibu is still lying on his sickbed after one of his legs was amputated during the week.
As a colleague, Inojie decided to pay a ‘get-well-quick’ visit to Mr Ibu, at the hospital, where he’s currently receiving treatment on Lagos Island, after leaving a movie set alongside actress Chinyere Wilfred.
But rather than feeling the excruciating pain that comes with the amputation of his leg, Mr Ibu ended up entertaining his visitors as if nothing had happened him.
Narrating the encounter, Inojie said “I never thought I could ever be able to relate this chapter of my encounter with Mr Ibu on his sick bed. This is because I had this funny feeling that it had the potential of making light of a very dire situation as his condition presented.”
He continued, “Well, the enigmatic humour monger himself, Ali Baba, has given me a soft landing to go ahead.
“I walked into his private ward in the ICU in the company of Chinyere Wilfred at whose behest we made the journey to Ever Care where he is being treated.
“We had just finished from a set, and she suggested that we take the opportunity to visit Ibu. With us were Jasmine, Mrs Ibu, and a woman I believe is her friend. As soon as we stepped into the room, his eyes lit up, and he retorted.”
Our conversation: Ibu: “Idiot, what are you doing here?” Inojie: “Mumu, why you carry your leg go give mallam to dey cut?” Ibu: “I get sense?”
“He would go on to quibble a few friendly banters with Chinyere. In fact, suffice to say that if a total stranger walked into that room that minute, he would never be able to tell who, indeed, was the patient. From one joke to the other, Mr Ibu literally entertained us. For a moment, I peered into his eyes as if searching for the secret of his willpower, and again, he levelled me out,” Inojie continued.
Ibu: “You dey pity for me? No fear, the doctor say I go fit still use the leg later, even though some betta-betta meat don commot for the leg.”
“You could never stop wondering where he got the strength under such agonizing pain to exude such positive energy so effortlessly.”
“Then came the moment. I picked his hands from his sides and held them tightly as I muttered, “Let’s pray.”
“We gazed intently at each other and connected on the fading highways of nostalgia, and upon the instance, I felt a mad rush of hot tears welling up beneath my quivering eyelids. I quickly turned away for fear my animal weakness was threatening to have the better of me, but too late. Ibu was crying, too!
“We prayed and cried freely and came to, unconsoled. He wiped his eyes as I did mine, and out of the blues, the Mr. Ibu in him reared its head again.
Ibu: “Idiot, you go dey cry. Wetin dey beat you?”
Inojie: “Mumu, you no cry?”
Ibu: “Na as I see you dey cry, na him I say make I support you na.”
“The two delectable nurses tending him laughed and laughed, and you could tell that Ibu made their jobs so very easy with his ebullient mien.
Inojie said he left the hospital with one of life’s vital lessons running through his mind. And it was: “Whoever can muster the willpower to survive in the face of anguish and life-threatening pain, can defeat death even in the most fearsome battle.”
Resilience and Health
Resilience represents a complex set of various protective and salutogenic factors and processes which are very important for understanding health and illness, process of treatment and healing, including comorbidities and multimorbidities. The focus here are biologic, psychological, social and spiritual factors and mechanisms which, in every life age, modulate the relation between stress, trauma and/or illness on one side and positive, favourable or desired result on the other side (Jakovljevi 2019, Masten 2012, Maddi 2005).
Resilience represents the ability to go back to the previous, so-called. normal or healthy condition, after some trauma, accident, tragedy or illness. In other words, resilience denotes the ability to cope with hard, stressful and traumatic situations while maintaining or restoring normal functioning. The higher the resilience, the lower the vulnerability which makes risks of disease and multimorbid conditions lower. According to some, resilience is associated with a force which drives a person to grow through suffering, stress, trauma, disorder or disease. Posttraumatic growth and resilience are two associated but still different terms. Mental disorders often have the function to encourage the patient to transform his wrong beliefs, to give up his wrong goals and life values and find new and authentic values, to revise his loser story and reveal his authentic life mission through different roles thus shaping his new identity.
Symptoms and neuropsychobiological disfunctions often overlap in mental disorders and many mental and somatic disorders are comorbid, which significantly affects the result of treatment. In addition to researching disorder-specific mechanisms, it is of great importance to identify disability-specific mechanisms of ability to recover. Transdiagnostic research of general and specific ability of recovery could significantly contribute to strengthening the concept of holistic-oriented medicine. Creating a more resilient brain in cancer patients is a huge challenge for the modern basic and clinical sciences (Masten 2012, Jakovljevi 2012).
The Resilience Lesson: 6 Ways to Live Your Best Life With a Chronic Illness
Leverage the power of lists.
When we experience adversity, our brains are hardwired to dwell on what went wrong—and then overgeneralize so one loss bleeds into other aspects of our lives, explains Andrew Shatté, Ph.D., president of Mindflex, a company that specializes in resilience training, and research professor at the College of Medicine, University of Arizona.
Make a list of the things your illness actually does prevent you from doing, and then a list of workarounds for each limitation.
To combat that tendency, he recommends making a list of the things your illness actually does prevent you from doing, and then a list of workarounds for each limitation.
If it’s too painful for you to chop veggies, for instance, treat yourself to the pre-cut kind at the grocery or get your partner or friends to do it for you and leave them in containers in the fridge. Or if you can no longer do yoga, modify your favorite poses and do them sitting in a chair.
What’s important is to retake control of your situation in new and incremental ways so you feel more optimistic and less powerless.
2. Give yourself permission to let go and accept your limitations.
Sometimes one key to better coping with a chronic illness is skipping some of the tasks you used to consider must-do’s—and being OK with it.
Elizabeth Bradley, M.D., the medical director of Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Functional Medicine, recommends starting the day with a checklist ranked by priority so you know what to do first, when your stamina is highest, and what can go by the wayside if necessary.
7 Health Advocates Who Are Determined to Change What It Means to Have a Chronic Illness
Similarly, Ingle, a HealtheVoices advisor, likes to think of her physical and emotional energy as pennies.
She has 12 pennies to spend per day and each activity—going to the doctor, taking a shower, cleaning—eats up a certain amount. If she has a lot of doctors’ appointments one day, she will skip the shower and use a no-rinse soap to conserve pennies.
She also acknowledges her limitations: If she’s invited to a party, she’s candid with her hosts that she can likely only stay for a half-hour, unless she feels up to more.
3. Seek out a support group specific to your condition.
“Peer support is incredible for recovery,” says Gabe Howard, a HealtheVoices advisor who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 25 and joined several support groups before going on to lead one himself. “These groups give everyone the opportunity to talk about real stuff.”
When his medications were causing sexual side effects, Howard was too embarrassed to bring it up with his doctors—and even felt tentative bringing it up in a support group, until another member said something. This, in turn, inspired others to share their experiences and they urged Howard to speak up, getting him to realize that doctors couldn’t help him if he wasn’t candid with them, too.
4. Practice the “three good things” daily mantra.
In addition to RSD, Ingle also suffers from migralepsy (migraines followed by seizures) and temporomandibular joint dysfunction, so pain is a constant for her.
How does she manage?
By reminding herself this is just one moment and that she can get through it. Even if you feel like a fraud at first, she says, the more you practice positive affirmations, the better off you’ll be.
Ingle’s therapist recommended she write down everything that made up who she was as a person. She came up with a whopping 75 items—and it was empowering.
Experts say she’s onto something. “The pain is real, but focusing on the pain doesn’t make it any better,” Shatté says. And when you maximize the positives in your life, you actually experience less pain—19% less, according to his research.
One easy way to do this: As soon as you wake up and before falling asleep at night, come up with three good things that happened to you during the day, he suggests. “It helps to show you that it hasn’t been all bad,” he says.
Ingle came up with a similar list after she’d lost her job, along with her house and her husband—all within the span of just two years. “My whole being had been wrapped around my job, and when I couldn’t do that anymore, I felt like I was nothing,” she says.
Her therapist recommended she write down everything that made up who she was as a person. She came up with a whopping 75 items—and it was empowering.
“I’d been totally tied into [the idea] that what I did equaled who I was,” she recalls. “But I realized that no one could take away my accomplishments, even if I couldn’t accomplish them again. I still had a reason to continue and fight for who I was.”
5. Meditate your way to less pain and better Zzzs.
Fitting in a 20-minute-a-day practice may sound daunting, but it could be worth the investment: Meditation has been shown to decrease the inflammatory markers in your body, boost your immune system and reduce pain, says Dr. Bradley.
And once that pain eases, you tend to sleep better—30% better, according to Shatté—which can lead to a host of other benefits, including more emotional control, focus and resilience.
If you’re new to meditation, you can start with these simple exercises: Focus on one word as you inhale, and focus on another as you exhale. Or try progressive muscle relaxation, either by tightening your whole body and gradually relaxing each part, or by taking a few breaths, then doing a body scan to see which parts are tense and working on loosening those.
You can also try a guided app, such as Calm, which Dr. Bradley recommends.
6. Reconcile the life you want with the life you have.
One of the hardest things to contend with when you have a chronic illness is what Shatté calls the “ideal-real gap”—the one between what you want your world to be like and the way it really is.
For Howard, that realization led him to give up his high-pressure, high-paying career in IT after finally accepting that it made his anxiety worse.
“Revamping my life plan was hard, but my original one wasn’t stable—and to pretend otherwise was a symptom of my illness,” he says.
Once you boost a sense of purpose in people’s lives, they tend to experience an improvement in their subjective experience of pain.
His advice: Find a new plan that’s reasonable for you to achieve.
