Later, when you open the door to your hostel room you find your friends waiting to know what the doctor said. You tell them you have a brain tumor. There are a few gasps. Shock all around. Everyone in the room has heard of a brain tumor, but no one has ever known anyone with one. Silence sponges life out of the room. You sit on your bed and look out the window. The Nairobi sky is a beautiful blue.
You can hear laughter from the next room. Cars honk in the distance. Life is moving on totally oblivious to your brain tumor. How can this be? How dare people laugh when there is “something in your head?”
Eventually when you are alone you will return the missed calls from your dad. You will tell him it’s a tumor. He will be a father and say what he should say, what any father faced with such devastating news would tell his last born, “you will be OK, the Lord will prevail.” He hands mom the phone and you tell her that you have brain tumor. You can hear her physically break down. You can hear stark fear in her gasp. You can feel your mother literally age as you hold the phone to your ear. Then she starts to cry. A wounded cry. She cries like she has already lost you. Your lower lip trembles with suppressed emotion.
That night you don’t sleep much. You wonder if you have a brain tumor because of your lifestyle. If you could have avoided it. You wonder if you’ve been cursed. And if you are cursed, why you? You continue asking these questions until the weak light of the dawn intrudes in your thoughts marking the first day of your life with the realisation that you are carrying something alien and mean in your head. The coming weeks, days, months get tougher when you are told that ‘that thing in your head’ is cancerous.
You go for chemotherapy, “the most gruesome experience you can ever imagine”. Your hair falls off. All of your hair. Your face turns dark, such that when you look at it in the mirror you think someone else is staring at you. Your body crumbles. Your speech starts to slur. The feeling in your left hand goes. There is pain, unimaginable pain. You feel like the devil has invaded your body. You have to go to India, you are told. Your father is a retired civil servant, your mom is a civil servant. They knock on doors. They take loans. They hold harambees. They make impossible promises. They do whatever anyone would do to save their son. And finally you find yourself on a surgeon’s table in India where they open your head and cut some of the offending tumor but it continues to grow, defiantly.
When they are done with that surgery, although successful, you are left paralysed on the right side and your speech is completely gone. You start occupational, speech and physiotherapy. You are now a 23 year old learning how to walk and talk again. You end up going for another surgery. And another. And another. They open your head so many times it leaves you feeling abused, molested and at the brink of defeat. But you hang on. You hang on for your mother and for those who are batting for you and you hang on because of that little fight left in you.
During one those long lonely nights lying recuperating in your hospital bed in India, you kill time by reading old stories on Bikozulu who you have read since “High School” and one night you drop him a DM on Twitter and ask him if he can make people aware of brain tumors.
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