Marge came to see me in my Elmont office one mid-Summer morning in 2018. Marge is a middle-aged African – American, married to a Nigerian. Both husband and wife and their children were registered patients in our medical practice. Very good people; a great stable family. Their teenage daughters were doing very well. The older was going to Medical School.
Marge was called in because of some abnormality in her lab results one week earlier. Marge had Ureaplasma/Mycoplasma in the urine specimen, which is known to be transmitted sexually, just like she did four months before then. Marge assured me that she had taken her treatment as prescribed, but that her husband had refused treatment. I told Marge that she could not be cured of the problem unless her husband got treated too. Marge replied that I don’t need to worry about her husband anymore because they were no longer together. What?
Marge’s husband traveled a lot for their African clothing business. He would travel to Nigeria, get the fabrics and have the clothing sewn into different African styles. The finished product would be shipped to the United States and sold in their shop. The family made good money and prospered.
About two years earlier, Marge’s husband felt dizzy one morning and developed chest pains. He never took good care of himself. He was under my care for hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and high cholesterol, the unholy trinity causing heart attacks and strokes. To make matters worse, he was very bad at following medical instructions. He would skip his medications for weeks at an end. I would get very upset with him. His hemoglobin A1C once went above 10, and usually hovered above 8, a sign of poor glycemic control of his diabetic condition.
Instead of calling the ambulance, he did the unwise thing by driving himself to the hospital. He told me later that as he exited the vehicle and made his way into the Emergency Room, he collapsed at the door. The emergency room department security guard saw him and summoned immediate help. He was carried into a cubicle immediately where it was discovered that he had suffered a cardiac arrest.
He was extremely lucky. His resuscitation was successful but he had suffered a massive heart attack. He woke up in the Intensive Care Unit with tubes in his nose, drips in his arms, monitors attached to his chest and beeping sounds from machines all around him. He thought that he was going to die. He motioned for the wife to come near and he made a full confession.
In bare whispers, he told the wife the reason why he usually stopped for several days in London during his many trips to Nigeria. He confessed that unknown to his wife, he has another wife in London, and they have two children together! That his frequent stops in London was to spend time with his other family, a Nigerian woman.
He laid his head back. Weak from the efforts of his full confession and expecting death to take him any minute. He did not expect to survive this ordeal, with the cardiac monitors showing his heartbeats going up and down, and sometimes pausing for seconds at a time. His breathing was laboured and he had pounding pains in his chest. His vision was foggy. The stunned wife remained silent by his side, her mouth still hanging open, but no sounds coming out.
But miraculously he survived! In the days following, with good care and medications, his heart beating became more regular. His breathing improved; the pounding in his chest abated. By the end of the week, he was strong enough to be discharged from the hospital.
When he came to see me, my first question to him was: what were you thinking, driving yourself to the hospital instead of calling the ambulance? He was extremely lucky. If he had been stuck in traffic for only a couple of minutes and had suffered his cardiac arrest while driving, it would have been catastrophic. He would have died and he would have endangered the lives of other road users and pedestrians.
After his near-death experience, he promised to be more responsible and follow medical advice more strictly. He actually kept his promise. In the months following his heart attack, his blood pressure, hemoglobin A1C and cholesterol numbers all showed remarkable improvement. I was very happy with him, but you get to wonder why we human beings never take good advice until we experience jolting life-threatening experiences.
My friend survived his ordeal, but the cat was already out of the bag. He had a lot of problems with his wife. They quarreled often. Marge could not get over the fact that her husband has another spouse, and a family, across the Atlantic. Polygamy is alien to her culture. The husband is a quiet man and never quarrelsome, and I was very sorry to see their happy family embroiled in such a great crisis.
I had repeatedly told Marge not to throw out her husband because he has another wife, but apparently, she finally took the step about a month before this visit. She saw me in the two weeks after she threw the husband out. She was still very angry.
I told her that she should not break up her family over the matter. I informed her that polygamy is common in Africa, with even Chief Justices and everyone doing it, some secretly, and that in my opinion there is nothing wrong with polygamy, provided the husband discloses to the women, and he is fair, especially to the first wife. Marge complained that the husband has been spending more money on the other woman and her children, and not contributing to paying the household bills. I told her that was bad and I was going to talk to him. But now it was too late.
My friend was able to cover up his tracks very well, until his “deathbed” confession. So the big lesson is this, if you make a bombshell deathbed confession, you better don’t come back home alive!
