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A Story of Medical Innocence

                                           

  

What is life without friends? It's like a world full of darkness. I lost a friend of mine to the cold hands of death on the 15th of October 1995. Pick up a chair and allow me to tell you how it happened.

   That fateful morning, my friend Eze, a final year accounting student, was going to read in preparation for his final exams. The exam had started and he had two papers left when calamity struck!

It started as a slight headache as he was reading in the library, then it became more serious and he decided to get some painkillers from the medicine store but the quantity he was told to take was too much for him and this guy had high blood pressure (sighs...) he took the drug and that was the end, he died! Eze didn't finish the rest of his exams.

   Oh! How I wish he didn't take that drug that day or maybe took a lesser quantity, maybe just maybe my friend will still be alive today. How I wish he knew better that some drugs are not meant for people like him who have high blood pressure, he probably wouldn't have left us that early.

   It was a painful exit and thinking how great he would have been if he were still alive breaks my heart even more. He left too soon.

******************

     I hope you grabbed one or two things from that fiction? The truth remains that ignorance has killed a lot of people more than death itself. Dying from what I will call medical ignorance is nobody's fault but yours! We all need to be responsible for our health. Don't leave it in the hands of a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist or anybody at all, because we are all humans and we make mistakes! Nobody is without errors.

If you learn to be more proactive about your health, you don't have to suffer the consequences of anyone's inadequacies which could be fatal. It could even cost you your life like it did Eze!. You should be able to ask your doctor the necessary "Why" questions before taking any drug.

   We all need to be medically informed, don't just swallow a pill because it was given to you by a doctor or a pharmacist. Yes, you don't need to study medicine to know this!

   In addition, people with high blood pressure should use paracetamol or possibly aspirin for pain relief. Unless your health care provider has said it's OK, you should not use ibuprofen, ketoprofen, or naproxen sodium. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16485829/)

 I will leave you with the words of Martin Luther King Jr, "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and honest stupidity".  In a place filled with ignorant men, a lot of people die. Please be wise, stay medically informed.

#Stay healthy with Goodness.

P.S: In case you are not aware, there are no symptoms of high blood pressure, but if you have high blood pressure, these are signs your blood pressure level is increasing: Severe headaches, nosebleed, tiredness and confusion, vision problems, chest pain, difficult breathing, irregular heartbeat, blood in the urine.

 


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