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Happy Sunday 👋🏾,

I haven't written one of these in nearly a year. I started in the hospital and now I'm finishing it on the sofa at home.

Two and a half weeks ago I had a seizure. My first in five years. Eight more in hospital after that.

More than one for every quiet year. I had to laugh at the maths. Just my luck, right?

A fortnight of lying in the same ward, the same bed, looking at the changing roster of patients, wondering who would become my neighbour for a night or maybe two.

You track the time of day by the medication rounds. 6am. 10am. 2pm. 6pm. Clockwork.

I was frustrated. Frustrated, this had happened to me. I’d been seizure free for so long, I think I just expected to rest a day and then go home.

Things were not that simple. The seizures triggered a pain flare-up, so intense that medication just wouldn’t give me any relief. That's why they kept me in.

In the quiet moments without visitors, or when my wife left, I stared at the ceiling tiles.

Fourteen days of tile counting will draw you into yourself. You start thinking about everything.

I thought a lot about my purpose, why I need to work so hard and all the things I want to accomplish. But I also felt sadness.

This stay was hard. I couldn't do a lot of the basics for myself. I was having tremors in my hands one day, just as I was about to eat my fried rice, so my little brother had to feed me.

I had to be escorted to the toilet. In some cases wheeled in because the pain was so debilitating.

That one I won't sugar-coat. That's a thing you don't think about until you can't do it without help.

I just could not wrap my head around how this was my reality.

The week before, I was lifting heavy weights, preparing for meetings and then suddenly my whole life was flipped upside down.

The contrast is too radical, I couldn’t have prepared for it.

You wait for the embarrassment to sink in and then you just… ask.

But this isn't really a piece about that.

Not the toilet runs. Not my body's annoying timing.

It's about the man opposite me.

He is Nigerian also. Ten years older than me. He'd already had two strokes.

Then a chest infection. Then seizures, five an hour, every hour, for about a week.

He couldn't speak. Couldn't move much. He’d been on the ward a few days when something started pulling me toward him. Some of it was the Nigerian thing, the recognition. But it was something else.

I watched him quietly deteriorate over the days. No visitors came to see him.

As rubbish as I felt, I knew I wanted or needed to do something for him.

I could barely walk to the toilet myself. Still having seizures. Still weak.

But I could hobble over. So I did.

I sat by his bed and talked to him about nothing in particular. He probably knows a fair bit about me by now. I just talked about my life.

He didn't respond. He couldn't.

I tried speaking to him in Yoruba. Bad Yoruba.

One day his eyes flickered. So I kept going.

One of the nights, he was really bad.

They put the live monitoring machine on him. You could see things weren't heading in the right direction.

I went over. This time I did something different. I held his hand and said a prayer.

Then I sang. Praise and worship. My singing voice is awful, Sheriden could tell you.

He blinked. He made a sound.

Not a wheeze for breath. A sound.

I still can't tell you if he was asking me to stop or if he liked it.

Either way. A sound. From a man whose body had stopped letting him out.

After that I went over more. On the hot days I dabbed his forehead with a wet white tissue.

I held his hand. I prayed with him.

Quietly. Just the two of us.

That whole thing humbled me. It changed me.

I knew I was walking out of that hospital somehow. For Kenny, that wasn't guaranteed.

Something settled in me. Holding a stranger's hand when he might be passing away does that.

There was another man on the ward, just to the left of Kenny.

In his nineties. His family came in shifts.

He didn't speak either. Just looked up at the ceiling.

Hours at a time. Eyes vacant and distant.

Like he was watching the playback of his life.

I watched him from across the bay for two days.

I asked the nurse how he was doing. "It's only a matter of time," she said. They were looking for a private room where his family could be with him at the end.

That stays with you.

When the man in his nineties spends his last day looking at the ceiling, you start to wonder what your replay is going to look like.

Both of those experiences have stayed with me.

They remind me to practise gratitude every day. That's what I’m trying to do. Even when I'm angry and feel pissed that this is happening.

I still have a life to live. I have people counting on me. People who love and need me.

I'm home now. The pain's still there. There's a lot I can't do around the house yet.

Sheriden and the family have been great through all of it.

What I need to do over the next couple of weeks is work through how I'm feeling. My independence has been taken away. I can’t simply get up and go because I feel like it.

This is also the first attack I've had as a dad. I have to work through that. How I feel, when I don’t feel like myself, when he is watching. Maybe that's another newsletter.

For now, it's rehab, physio, slowly working through the pain and getting back into the gym.

I've got a big event in Nigeria in three and a half weeks. I need to be fit enough to get there.

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Have a great week!

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