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HDU HORRORS

It started with a simple headache, but then, most catastrophes begin with ‘simple’ things don’t they? Like that car wreck story in England that cost 12 or so lives because of a bee flying in through one drivers window.

Simple.

When we look back at disasters we begin to isolate incidences and innocent mistakes or magnify simple misunderstandings that turn a gorgeous day into a mournful wreck and you’re left wondering, literary, wtf?? Then we begin pointing those nasty blame fingers.

Let’s see what this disaster was and if blame should be the end result…

So, I’m 50 and recently became bloody proud of it because despite what I call forever living in hospitals due to some fortuitous and chance games that the gods have decided to play with me and my [sexy] bod, I keep getting out of the hospitals and shouting SHAME!! at them and getting my groove back… [yes. Stella pun intended!!] …so, really,  my name isn’t Nyakio for nothing. It means Hardworking and loving hard. I do. I will shake aromat all over my life and make it happen, happily, and put smiles on my face as well as all those around me… because after all, life is too short, ja??

That sentence is for those who think that staring at a ceiling in HDU is okay for a 50 year old mama.

Put it that way, it’s almost okay and alright to belittle myself like that, but looking at the other side of my coin and my absolute nuttiness (flavor – almond) – it doesn’t make sense. The same way a friend calls you and tells you in a shocked whisper (or shout- you know, those friends who you love to bits but jamaani!!! they just SHOUT all.the.time. yes, that one) so, you get this phone call and it goes like this:

Your friend: Haiya, did you hear about Naomi

You: What?

Your friend: Woiye… she had a heart attack just like that, pap, gone

You: Aki? Naomi which one?

Your friend: Si that 26 year old babe, the one who works for that cement factory and drove one of those foreign model cars..

You: [In shock] - Naomi the 26 babe has died of a stroke?

Your friend: Acha, mambo za siku hizi… ya, imagine, I was at her birthday bash just last month… woiye… her poor kid and boyfee…the wedo was next month you know… it’s so so sad!!! [weeps on phone].

That sounds really sad, doesn’t it. Really. Sorry for killing you so softly Naomi, but it’s just an example, revive. Thing is, let’s replace the same entire convo with the name Nyakio: Or your name. Yes. Use your name.

Your friend: Haiya, did you hear about Nyakio?

You: What?

Your friend : Woiye… she had a heart attack just like that, pap, gone

You: Ati kii? Nyakio which one?

Your friend: Si that 50 year old mathee, the one who works for that cement factory and drove one of those foreign model cars..

You: Nyakio that one died of stroke? Chick, what’s your problem? She was 50. Aki, go buy a black chique outfit and tell me when the funeral is and matangas … she’s lived a life, wait, let me call her daughter, you know her daughter is Naomi’s age… let me call and ask for the 411…

But I found out that it doesn’t play out quite like that.

Life isn’t that immaterial, oh no. It’s deep. As far as I’m concerned, mine is going to go on for another 50 years or so, I mean, I need to be hugged by my Boo a few more times and kissed senseless like I’m 17, I need to laugh at some brilliant comedy with Johnny Depp in it until I cry tears and my ribs hurt from laughter, I need to meet all my mad insane female friends scattered across Africa and do a pyjama party of immense and magnitudinal proportions, so…why pack up now? That’s me. Just saying..

Hello you - reading this.

Why do you want to pack up now?

Why are you living your life like you don’t seriously give a flying goose?  And it’s not hard to know this simple truth, try having a conversation with a millennium and you get all these robotic answers if you ask, WHY are you doing what you’re doing …

Answer : because, um, err..because, ya, you know, life ya…yah, you know.. like..

[blank].

So when I was wheeled into the HDU unit and told, here you must stay, I panicked.

Total. We all know, HDU IS the ERROR 404 as far as body is concerned and if the IT guys  can’t fix your simple mulika mwizi laptop in the office (if it’s not a Mac, then it’s a mulika mwizi, basi!!! hahahahahaaa)… sema sasa when it’s you with an error 404.  And my team of docs, they really, really, didn’t know quite what was cutting with me. Yes, I had a headache, and my blood pressure was in the 300 over 200’s, but… WHY?… so they’d try this and rule that out and try this other one and rule that out and take this test and poke there and prod there…. [Ok, those are sad details acha tu..]

As in, these guys in their blue pajama suits and crocs and unhelpful smiles were serious unto death. Get onto this bed and lie down, and in less than half an hour, I had been hooked up to some serious major expensive machines, had drips on both arms and my phone – horrors!! MY PHONE was taken from me. No wtf, (whatsapp, twitter and facebook) seriously?

Because of a headache…

Later on my Doc kinda hinted at what it was I had (if they hint you don’t panic and go ballistic) but I duh, checked it up later on when I got home and apparently it’s one of those extremely RARE cases that knocks out only 1% of the population and again I say, the gods are really having fun with me. 30 minutes later into that Doctors clinic and you’d be admiring my ashes right now. In the Kintsugi Urn.

And this is the difficult part.

I’m writing this and crying and shaking and getting weepy every 5 minutes like some weird push-a-button-she’s-gonna-break-down-females – the ones you avoid like a malenge. Me, I’m fun loving. I’ve been through hell and back and yet, this visit to HDU is still in my blood, shaking it and frothing it and I’m asking, y y y y?? Sleeping alone is the hardest, I wake up in total panic mode.

But because I’m the Queen of Kiambu plus a very very IP (I so am), I’m at that point of more like, hey, we get what we get, we get over it, and we get on with it. No two ways out.

Because in HDU, there are only 2 doors out. Either through ICU and then out through a coffin – which I detest and told my daughters to please, hey, it’s NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. Me – it’s burning to ashes and set those in an urn. What was infuriating me was that I hadn’t bought the urn yet and it didn’t look like I was going to be let out to buy one. So… I had to take the other option – get well and walk out of HDU.

Ladies, Guys too… I’m talking to you all. Old. Young. Youthful. Oldish – and pampered like ..like.. hmm… ok, Queen Elizabeth (safe bet) or those older women we see with with 20 bob in her pocket for fare, so if it rains and the mat’s hike the fare…yah.

Listen,… Africa is hard and totally unrelenting. She’s a bitch on a good day. She’s also totally gorgeous, and magnificently gloriously beautiful and she has a soul that will hold you and hug you so hard that all your broken bits get knit back together again.

So, Get up.

It’s hard, we’ve all been through shit, some of us have literally eaten it, been smeared in it, gotten stuck in it (the Bible calls it Mirey Clay) but we don’t need to look like we have, I mean, like, yuk. Seriously, Why do some of you DO THAT?

Stopit!

Because like Africa, we’re African delicious beautiful beautiful women. [#nohomo me like men too much]… but, yes, we African women (esp Kenyans) are beautiful and hard bitches on our best days, but with souls deeper and fuller with love than lake Tanganika (yes, it’s the DEEPEST lake in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD).

So,

     you got that in you.

Yap.

Live it.

People, my body is weak and nothing works like it used to. I’m lethargic and falling asleep at the drop of a hat – so I have to avoid wearing them (…sob. How I love my hats). I also have to keep mentally charged and challenged - which is ok, as most of my friends are beyond Looney Tunes® insane and I understand that Android phones need more charging than a regular mulika mwizi…proof I need more charging… I’m no regular person.

My bed side table doesn’t contain my favorite novels anymore, but a miscellanea pharmacy of ‘controlled’ drugs which the Doc said I have to take for another 50 years. (sigh) anything to avoid HDU. If I get hit by a Paradiso, that’s a different thing, but no, Haiya, I will swallow those drugs daily to keep the headaches and HBP away.

Off the alcohol and on the drugs, I tell you, these gods, they’re jokers.

… so… what’s your excuse for not bounding out of bed with enough zest and bubbly to make everyone around you thankful that THEY are alive? Coz this story isn’t about you.. it’s about making the people in your life ridiculously happy and to let them know that they are totally loved.

For you? Bound out of bed because Life is just awesome, beautiful, tender like a newborn babe, sweet and juicy like a sun-ripened mango eaten with the juices running down your shirt and not giving a damn coz that fruit is just… divine??

How will you know your quintessence, your vital organism, your self, your SOUL?

How will you know how much love you have in your inner you if you don’t try and dive into your own lake Tanganika? Love for yourself, for life, for song and dance and laughter, love of Life…

How will you know how life looks like underwater with your eyes wide open, how will you learn that love hurts so unbearably and yet, you can’t live without it? How can you know how it feels like to breath underwater and not drown? How will you know what your Purpose is unless you try every crazy thing there is to try out there and discover through your mistakes what your Passion is? And How will you know that a little craziness spread on your bread each morning for breakfast is far healthier, funnier and so much sweeter than jam!

You get up,

shrug it off,

say okay, it’s tough,

and you get going…

with a smile that rocks the world!!

Nyakio J. Munyinyi for the XpenSieve Report© JUNE 2014

[Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to xPenSieve© with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Headline banner design by NJMunyinyi.]

                                                                                                                               

A BRIDE'S DELUSIONAL HAPPINESS

Have you ever held onto a couple of ballons on a string then let them go? Up, up, up and away they go, beautiful and colourful - utterly beautiful - and they glide away .... gone. Forever...

That image is often in my mind when I think of what women are told when they get married, mainly because I was given the same thoughtless lecture when I was a young bride:

“… and now, you’re going to be MRS. SO AND SO…, SO.. you have to forget all those things you did in the past and embark on a BRAND NEW LIFE as MRS. SO AND SO.”

Maybe that’s why I don’t go to weddings anymore.

Because contained within that sentence is an old outdated belief that causes more damage than any other single decree that I have ever heard uttered.

Back then, sadly, I believed it, and in a dizzy delight, I tore up old pictures of me laughing with former male friends - group photos comprising of delightful times when I was either in campus, or in Youth Group - or pictures taken in those old PHOTO ME INSTANT booths, 6 to 8 of us crammed in a tiny space constructing weird expressions on our faces as the machine flashed a continual burst of brilliant light – contorted with laughter; pictures of mad escapades to Mombasa or Nyeri or Garrissa or Marsabit or Malindi or Kisumu – many a number in the UK; and others in France, and more in Nigeria.

I tore them all up. Because – I was told – I could not carry such trash into my ‘NEW LIFE’.

Well, today, I know better – and – yes, you can argue with me all you want but it’s my blog (LMAO) so I’m going to give some out of the box advice based on experience and a surprising question - how many of you ladies have Khangas? Write down the different uses of those khangas NOW. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow, but right NOW in your present circumstances. That one khanga can be used for a variety of different purposes in the present time, things that you never ever thought about when you bought the Khanga. Yap. When you bought it, you may how thought, ‘oh, how pretty. ‘

Memories are like that. They are a part of our lives and they make us who we ultimately are. When we take a picture and save it on FaceBook, or Twitter or stick it onto a Scrapbook, that picture carries us back into a singular moment in our lives that inexorably molded and shaped us into the who of what we are today. Looking at past photographs is a veritable visual 3D that thrusts our minds back to that moment. Colours, smells and emotions can climb out of a single photograph and overwhelm us, which is why I guess our new Husbands don’t like it when we giggle at old Facebook photo’s…

Literally, a single picture is similar to ‘a thousand words’.

But.

Take away our memories and we cease to be who we are. Take a simple look at accident victims or those with memory loss, amnesia or Alzheimer’s. Who are they? If they themselves don’t know, how can we know? We are made up of our memories. Our writings, photographs, pictures, keepsakes, and ‘stuff’ – that is what large organizations call a DATABASE.

And yet, as young women, we’re told to forget that Database.

??

Forget too – the servers and the service providers. Forget our friends, delete our memories, refer to the past ‘no more’.

Hahahahahahahahaaaaaa….!!!! ß------- that’s a sarcastic laugh…

Yes. And change the Browser while you’re @ it.

Because we’re told we need new friends. HIS. Not mine. For some reason, I had to get rid of my ‘unmarrieds’ and ‘my’ friends. But No. Not his. He was allowed, for some reason, to keep his friends…

[by the way I hear tell there are some women who do the same to their new husbands and tell them to get rid of old female friends cousins included...OIA I tell you. Sad]

… And if I didn’t get rid of ‘my’ friends, little word bombs (read grenade) would be inflicted now and again to inflict such a terror of hurt and internal destruction that I would eventually drop said friend(s).

Not only from him, but from society. Just listen to your local radio. Your pastor, best friend, godmother, best aunty, everyone – it seems, the young woman must be isolated from her former life and it must be killed.

It is easy, all too easy to isolate young brides and confine them into a box. Into a Coffin. Where they became a zombie. In proper English, we say Living Dead. Cut off from the life line of former friends, denied permission to laugh and revive themselves over old memories, and forced to interact with new strangers … they begin to rot.

And we wonder why half the marriages lately last like 10 minutes? Because unlike [ME], of a former generation – young ladies of today cannot and will not and shouldn’t confirm to such idiocy.  Destroy and delete and utterly cut out our past lives in a single week?

We are who we are because of the choices that we made back in the past. We are defined by our choices - even the simple choice we made 2 minutes ago to read this blog.

Every single thing we do reveals us – we grow continuously – mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. When we stop growing, we die. When we stop learning, our brains die. When we stop anything at all,  we, duh, STOP.

This then is the quandary to the laughing happy girl who had many friends in her life before she got married. She could, for example, go through her Facebook albums and laugh at past memories and silly things she did [good or bad] which ultimately made her who she is today.

Wait… I can hear you begin to Judge – don’t. God isn’t hiring.

Think of this and think deeply.  What are Friends ?– That a new bride is supposed to let go of her entire support system – her network - is as terrifying as telling an Insurance Company that their old server has collapsed and a new one will be brought in .. maybe .. next year.

Oh. And that that  ‘new server’ is actually an ‘old server’ that belonged to another firm and suited their specifications very well so it should work well for your enterprise.  That is, her new hubbies friends and their girlfriends. Even if she can’t stand them.

Just change all your passwords and codes and … well… what’s the fuss exactly?? Really. Young ladies of today are so fussy. What’s wrong with her husbands’ friends?? She really shouldn’t go see her former single friends… they will spoil her..

Nyakio’s out of the box advice.

As women, we wear different types of uniforms. We wear aprons in the kitchen. Skirt suits when we go to work. Hijabs for the mosque. Skimpy sexy negligible bits of material for our lovers.

But, underneath our covering, we’re still US. You are still your soul essence. 8 to 86 you are YOU.

And we change our clothing depending on the occasion. When I became a new mom, I learnt that I could use a khanga to tie my child firmly onto my back as I worked in the house. Before I had that child, I never used a khanga like that and neither did I need to.

SO it is with life, we are who we are in our souls and spirits and we are not defined by our exterior self. Those are uniforms and clothes that we pick up and use when necessary and discard when not necessary. Many can be set aside for the next generation, so that we can tell our children – here – use this, I used it as well.

Do not be delegated into becoming a plastic consumer – to use and discard. Especially friends.

Carry old memories, books, pictures, friends and the entire SERVER with you into your new life. As you grow, you decide what to retain and what to refresh. And what to store for the archives. DO NOT DELETE.

The second piece of Nyakio’s out of the box advice is this: If a man is threatened by your friends, past, current or future, male or female, or by your hobbies, work or anything that makes you who you are, and begins dropping grenade words unexpectedly in your life to terrorize you into submitting into his demands – honey - leave.

Don’t blink or think. Just leave. Because insecure men feel just that – threatened. If a mosquito lands on you, they will feel threatened. If you walk on water, they’ll say it’s coz you can’t swim.. so – pack and go.

Your past is YOUR past. You are the only one who can decide what to keep and what to archive, what you need and what to delete.

Nyakio J. Munyinyi for the XpenSieve Report© 2014

[Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to xPenSieve© with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Headline banner design by NJMunyinyi.]