Pfui to Destiny’s Angel: Nothing is written.

Lest it should be thought that I have succumbed to some sort of Islamic fatalism  paralyzing my actions by a belief in an inflexible predestination let me say : Pfui! Shoo! to Destiny’s Angel. That is to say: on the thorny question of predestination and free will I would be firmly on the side of the camp who says: God helps those who help themselves, or in the words of Oliver Cromwell: ‘believe in God but keep your powder dry.’ I remember the scene in my favourite film Lawrence of Arabia when Peter O’Toole responds to Ali’s  (of course played by the great Omar Sharif RIP)  fatalism in the face of what seemed like an impossible undertaking: he was suggesting he returns over the burning sand dunes to look for the man who was missing and who would certainly die. Ali said the man’s  time was up and that' it was written.' ‘Nothing is Written’ snapped O’Toole and turned his camel back into the burning desert and recovered the man.

Now it is like this: Keita is riddled with cancer. His spine looks like an Emmenthal cheese there are so many holes and there are tumours growing everywhere. His blood count of white blood cells or plasma cells are mass producing at an increasing rate, taking over and leaving no space for red blood cells which means he is totally anemic and has to be given  blood transfusions. But he is not bed ridden, he is walking around , talking and laughing and apart from being tired and from having bad pains in his back at night the cancer has not yet caused any major damage to his body’s function.

We went to the hospital in Bamako which has treated him since the beginning, and rather than coming up with a plan he was prescribed morphine. We know what that means of course: after morphine there is nothing. It seemed to us that he was being written off. As we were leaving the hospital a couple of orderlies were crossing the road before our car carrying a stretcher with a body wrapped up in a brightly coloured piece of cloth on their way to the morgue. ‘That will be me soon’ said Keita, and however much I tried to shake it off, we  both felt the deep chill of Destiny’s Angel passing over us…

But Alhamdilullah: there is Keita’s old friend the neurologist Dr. Guida Landouré, who is on our side as it were, willing to put up a fight. He also works at Point G, the hospital with  Keita’s hematology/oncology department. The three of us had an emergency meeting, and we decided that Keita should take no morphine (except in absolute emergency) and that we would find another way. So, armed with another painkiller Keita left for Segou to celebrate Eid el Fitr  -the end of Ramadan- with his other family. He will be back very early Monday morning and we will meet finally with his own proper doctor –who we did not get to see last time. Plans will be made. There are ways to combat his disease, even at this stage. If we were in Europe this would happen naturally and he would receive a new drug combination, chemotherapy and perhaps radio therapy. Once it was decided to keep fighting all looked nearly sunny again… We have been through worse times than this: seven years ago Keita was paralyzed and dying. His spine looked just as bad as it does now. But there was a way around it because we were willing to look for it.   It had perhaps  been written but we read through the lines and rewrote the page…