Mental Health Awareness Month

What Exactly is Lupus? – 10 facts to mark World Lupus Day

Goodreads review

“Am I dead yet,”…Diagnosed during her high school years, the author decided to keep a personal diary of her confusion,

fear, and challenges of being diagnosed with Lupus. Lupus, also known as Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) is a

disease that can affect many different body systems, including the joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells, heart, and lungs.

Facts about LUPUS

1.Full meaning Systemic Lupus Erythematosus or SLE

2. It is an inflammatory autoimmune disease caused by genetic abnormalities.. This means that the body’s defence attacks

its own cells, tissues and organs.

3. Women are affected in 90% of cases.

4. Symptoms include feeling of unwellness, fatigue, fever, rash, joint pain, loss of appetite and weight loss.

5. Its rash is unique in the way it spreads, flatly across the bridge of the nose and cheeks in a butterfly pattern.

Hence the symbol on campaign posters.

6. SLE causes damage to the kidneys, heart, nervous system and other organs.

7. People affected experience intervals of wellness and this is part of why the ongoing damage to vital organs

becomes life-threatening.

8. Doctors make a diagnosis of lupus with the presence of 11 criteria

9. Treatment involves medication to reduce inflammation, steroids and in severe cases, chemotherapy.

This is carried out by a specialist who is called a rheumatologist.

10. People living with SLE can reduce the severity of symptoms and progression of the disease by avoiding

direct contact with sunlight, using their medication as prescribed and seeing their doctor for close monitoring.

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If you learnt something new from this post, kindly share.

Dr Mariam Toye

Founder and Editor at OumissaInspire

Book Reviews With Oumissa 10: Bury Me Come Sunday Afternoon by Nike Campbell-Fatoki

Autographed copy

Title: Bury Me Come Sunday Afternoon

Author: Nike Campbell-Fatoki

Genre: Fiction

Pages: 178

Publisher: Quramo Publishing

Published: 2016

This collection of short stories is as enjoyable as it is powerful. I attended her book reading and signing event at Patabah Books a couple of years ago. Learning about her inspiration, background and the stories behind her stories before reading them brought on a more profound meaning.

The variety centres on the lives of Nigerians home and abroad, the longing for old memories is existing with the pull of the foreign land. The stories are split between the immigrant experience; from the tumultous to the mundane; and the joy and troubles of living in a country like Nigeria. She fluidly paints many ways in which home and abroad are different and yet so similar The book is laced with humour that relieves the reader’s heart of some of its weight.

Moral dilemmas are presented in a way we can associate with, a sort of mirror for our own situations. Thus, we understand the characters’ struggles without judgement.

Familiar everyday scenarios brought to life in this book include rebelling against an overbearingly strict Pentecostal father, the public transport system and underworld in the sprawling, unforgiving city of Lagos, mental illness and a patriarch exacting posthumous revenge on his uncaring family through his will.

But it does make us stop and tell ourselves, the negative things need not be part of life.

Others are green card fraud, learning disability, nosy neighbours, rosy teenage love soured by pregnancy and family disgrace, domestic violence and how women continue to condone it for the sake of the children seeing it a necessary part of life. They make a life facing off blows and yet remain resilient and in some cases, even triumphant.

But it does make us stop and tell ourselves, “The negative things need not be part of life”. We can identify secondary characters who, in their own ways, change the status quo for better.

One of my favourites is A Brewing Storm. Nestled in the middle, narrated with the innocence of a child’s perspective, it explores domestic violence with brave depth , elicits a sense of shame that we as a society have allowed this evil to go on for far too long. The physical and psychological pain, the constant inching to the precipice of death by the hand of a husband, the scars on the children’s psyche all clutch at your heart strings.

Worst of it for the character is the support system of close women (victims themselves) who accommodate her and the kids after each beating. They tell her there is no other way but to endure it. She must maintain the worth accorded to her in the society, the value that comes with being in a man’s house.

There is a remarkable finesse to which Campbell-Fatoki delivers this and the wider societal norms set against women. We see how women (like mother-in-laws) are complicit in this. This chapter is not written as funny. Even as she plays with friends, the fear of her mother’s death is palpable in the child’s consciousness. In a fitting climax, a battered woman and her kids take different desperate stands to protect themselves from an abusive man of the house.

But we also learn that it is and should not be the norm. This was beautifully written about in Searching For Miss Anderson. A woman living with schizophrenia from her teenage years finds unwavering support, the most she’s ever had, in her husband. He stays by her side, actively involved in her long winding recovery process. Happy marriages resplendent with mutual love and respect, providing a safe space for nurturing children are possible and do exist. That balance is necessary, a true depiction of reality

Happy marriages resplendent with mutual love and respect, providing a safe space for nurturing children are possible and do exist.

The Rake and the Wallflower, set in the seventies, details the discrimination people with learning disabilities face in an engaging story about a Nigerian girl who is married off to a man she knows only through a photo in. Abuse and restrictions follow as soon as she lands in America. Doubly due to the norms of the time that said he could treat his wife anyhow but also because he considered her a retard.

People treat those with learning difficulties with condescension often forgetting that they have thought processes and register all of it. It is a brilliant story. It was heartwarming to see this woman escape the horrific domestic situation with the help of her neighbour, a lovely American old lady and her father back at home who never considered his daughter as any less than others.

In all, in presenting what we recognise, in the laughter and tears it evokes, Bury Me Come Sunday Afternoon calls us to answer deep moral questions. I appreciate its dedication to family which is present as a common thread throughout. Beneath the hilarity and resonance of the tales is a call to us to keep enjoying what is good about us but commit to rectifying the many faults we have as individuals and a society at large.

Rating 4/5

What are your thoughts about this book?

Sunday Brunch With The Ladies and Patricia Cornwell

Alhamdulillah for these amazing, talented, loyal , driven and loving women. They are so committed to growth and are a good support system for one another.

Pathology was one of my faves in college. Was it because it was taught by groundbreaking female professors? One of them was a great Muslimah role model who did a lot to help us hijabi students (there were battles we faced that only people like her could help us fight) but she really was and still is a mother to all students.

Or because it is such a rich and intriguing field; the basis of disease, the bedrock of medicine itself. For if we do not understand what is wrong with the body, how can we begin to fix it?

Morbid anatomy had the heaviest textbook in that year. I remember being scared of my Robbins and Cortran falling on me from my overhead bookshelf and crushing me in my sleep haha.

This love had started way before med school. Patricia Cornwell and other forensic pathologists/medical examiners/coroners were favourites. It was so cool to see doctors in them using findings from the autopsies they performed to help detectives nail serial killers and other perpetrators and close difficult cases.

I honestly wonder how my strawberry milkshake looked like vanilla with pink stripes. But I loved it anyways.

I’m still enjoying this book. It just got fast-paced.
What are your thoughts on forensic thrillers?