St Pancreas by Intelligent Design
Sola, pray for me he said when I gave him a hug in his hospital bed in Newark 4 weekends ago. He had a stent in his gall bladder and a drain from it poking through his skin, antibiotics going through one vein and iron supplements through another. He said he was feeling much better, that if I had seen him 24 hours earlier…thank God for the doctor who decided to treat him empirically with antibiotics. But he could hardly walk.
Hopeful, he took early discharge that Sunday so that he could attend his chemotherapy session. I knew that he was not well enough.
He died last weekend.
Endocrinologist struck down by St Pancreas. Intelligent Design wins again. If you wanted to punish your creation how better to do it than give it a sweet tooth then weave its solution into a triangular sponge you wrap round the gall bladder duct, join it to the liver and a bend in the small intestine, sweep it backwards from right to left in an underground network of vessels that stops at all stations, knowing that it will go wrong and contaminate?
Then you wait. Sebastian goes to university with many distinctions. He gets married, has children. You wait until he is a Chief physician in Lagos. Then you watch Nigeria rot and Sebastian uproot from all he knows and in his sixth decade pass exams to practice in the USA. Omniscient, you are watching. Then, when he is settled and his practice is growing, you blow your whistle. St Pancreas station stirs. Not BR, Virgin but coachloads of DNA, genes and mutants.
The Intelligent Designer did not want plain and painless smoky jaundice. St Pancreas explodes in the small hours. Fuel leaks. Acids, Bases shed into the gut. They burn, tear, twist so badly that even stoical Sebastian has to call for help. They find a 4 by 5 blockage at St Pancreas, and good news it can be ablated once it is shrunk a bit.
But the Intelligent Designer waits until they start treatment before the whistle blows again. Blood pours out till Beth Israel takes Sebastian in.
Sola, pray for me he said when I gave him a hug before I left for home.
My cousin, Sebastian. Second cousin really, my father’s maternal cousin, we used to call Uncle Wale though he was not that much older than me.
In medical school it was his wedding photograph I had on my wall, not biochemical charts or the human skeleton. I baby sat for him. I was a preregistration doctor but didn’t care. At weekends we would drive round to meet his many friends. Meet my young cousin the doctor, he would say, yes the son of my cousin, or uncle, the doctor. He had fun. He was brilliant. The jaws of those who underestimated him dropped when he dismissed his exams. What a role model; one you could not beat.
I blame the rot in Nigeria for his death.
And I blame the Intelligent Designer above all.
If we humans were your first design, Intelligent Designer, the first iteration, the first draft, why didn’t you rub us out and draw us again?
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