Your Health is Your Wealth

“Health is Wealth is both an observation and a sentence play on two rhyming words but it has got a screaming truth in it which should not by any means be challenged nor itch tongues that are too quick to correct a false notion. I believe that little things count: The Little Right Ones! As a custom, one speedily halts another guy. Personally, I have never allowed a biological brother the careless chance of trifling with one of these little things that to me count.
Now, to strike the cardinal point, Preventive Health Care ensures that one does not over an extended period of time glimpse the premises of a hospital, let alone produce one’s feet at the doorstep of a doctor’s consulting room. Through daily recourse to Preventive Health Care one is spared the-sometimes-unwished sight of a white-robed medic who is liable to wire the ear-pieces of a stethoscope to his own while placing its tubular part on one’s chest for the awkward sounds feared, ahead of penning down on a piece of paper life-saving drugs. At such moments, inescapably, the fellow in question marches towards a pharmacy or nurses do so on his behalf. Painful sums of money are released by him for the prescribed drugs and recommended ones, before he faces the as much staggering final hospital bill!
Crazily, there was Mr. Zorro Ijoma whose mode of feeding had continually failed to acknowledge the richness in vitamins of the fruits we eat. Often, Zorro was skipping inclusion of pineapples, strawberries and other vitamin C providers in his weekly menu. Only by accident was he letting the juice from orange, on some days, cross his gullet for his body’s use after digestion in his bowels. No painting the incorrect picture of things, usually absent from Zorro’s dining table were the said fruits and their sisters, as though he owned a built-in-the-body vitamin-C secreting gland in his rather languid one. Not a teenager was Zorro Ijoma at the period he was enacting this ridiculous feeding drama! I would be correct if I pegged his year of birth to The Sixties of The Last Century: specifically to the year America launched her Apollo Space Craft into The Orbit. Then, his father was flirting with the idea of naming him Apollo shortly after his arrival to collectively please his enlightened fellow Nigerians, who held the LIS Apollo, initiative in High Esteem. His Zorro’s first name turned out to be his father’s last minute honoring of a solemn promise he had made a Zorro co-worker to call his first son by his Zorro…
But come to think of it Zorro, as a name, does sound like Zero’ indeed, rings a negative note and neither at all pleasing in the ears ‘Zoroaster’ Name of The Religionist of lesser fame than Christ and Muhammad. In any case, most likely, there are not many Zorro bearers globally and certainly not many Zoroastrians inhabiting our earth…
Quickly, to stop a bit of aimless roaming over the subject, Zorro Ijoma was The Perpetually Sick in 2013 he turned forty-five, for having been born in 1968. Zorro’s Chronic Asthma became the worse for it, even as he was steadily hypotensive. Not a single day he could spare himself oral administration of his asthma drugs between bronchodilators and corticosteroids! Both the former and the latter Zorro was helping himself with for longer reliefs form intermittent attacks of the disease and with anti-histamines for his frequent allergy to dusts and pollens.
Zorro was simply not finding them funny: the sudden seizures of his breaths after a biting cold, intense heat, inhalation of stench, enervating labour, stress and even a risked rib-cracking laughter. Nor was it something to dismiss as Not A Big Deal the irritating sums of money he was often constrained to put by for replacements of constrained to put by for replacements of these drugs and related ones. Always for Zorro’s company, Becotide Inhaler - his preferred Aerosol corticosteroid – which drug stores kept its price at N2000:00 and the fast-relieving Ventolin Inhaler released to their buyers at nearly N1000:00…
“And what’s This Hypotension that sometimes pays you visits?” a Reuben Kasie friend of Zorro once begged him its clearer picture, already presuming that it must be a facsimile of Hypertension.
“Rather the Dangerously Low Blood Pressure,” Zorro’s lips coolly supplied to Enquiring Kasie, still adding that Hypertension is The Dangerously High.
For his helpless response, Reuben Kasie breathed a soft sigh of The Sincerely Touched. As far as his layman’s medical imagination could thrash out both The Hypotensive and The Hypertensive are Hapless Souls in a rowed boat that will most likely capsize mid-course the Journey of Life…
Zorro’s issues with health for which he was largely the cause, largely kept him out of touch with friends and neighbors. Though, he was living at a vantage position for unhindered gazes at his scenic neighborhood, he was not enthused about this or, more correctly, his poor health was not obliging him the contented chance to be doing so. Strictly, the opposite was the case with his friend, Reuben Kasie, more likely than less to be seen watching others’ discreet actions and the indiscreet and in their streets just determining who was not as honest as he or she had appeared…
That’s right, Zorro’s Health in his middle ages, he to blame for it, was not releasing to him moments of self amusement of The Genuine or The Silly besides often leaving him with a dry purse, very obvious in his barely furnished room of two or three wooden chairs!
Zorro’s interviewees on the fruit matter he did not starve replies to their concerned questions for being The Plain-Speaking. It was in 2009 that his fancy for pineapples went down, previously a fruit he never forgot to gingerly display on his dining table twice weekly…
What was it again Pineapple was doing to his teeth and gum that he felt bad about? Oh Yes! Every consumed slice of it would set his teeth on edge, leaving him incapable of chewing other food pellets for long minutes - it did not matter that he later rinsed his mouth or gargled it to quit the discomfiting after-taste!
Also Orange, formerly an essential part of Zorro’s Dinner, he began to give the distance of one, who would not bear joining The Ulcer Community either as a Duodenal, Peptic or Less Worrisome Gastric Full Member…
Unwittingly, Zorro Ijoma had begun to permit occasional gum bleeding from contacts between his teeth and the not-easily-chewable, in all, health-wise, allowing The Cat to be away while Some Mice, not one, not two, earnestly wished to play!

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