Goodbye Hafsatu Yusuf, Kano mother 15 times over (1)

Hafsatu Yusuf’s husband is a motorcycle taxi driver. Very moving were their last minutes together. She called him to her bed side, told him the bleeding had weakened her, said she did not believe she would survive it and made him promise her that he would take care of their children the way she would like them cared for.

No one knew at that time that they had 10 other children with one mortality. The news of the quintuplets was moving enough especially at this time of economic discomfeitures globally, to make Kano State government adopt them.

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I have not been at peace with labour rooms since I learned at nine in 1959 that my mother bled to death from placenta bleeding after she had her fifth baby, the fourth boy, at the then Ikeja General Hospital (now Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, LASUTH). So, before my wife made her first labour room visit in 1984, I made sure she had been on Apple Cider Vinegar drink for no fewer than six weeks. I learned from Cyril Scott and several studies then that it possesed such phosphate salts as stopped bleeding when blood came in contact with air. It worked for all her pregnancies as it did for many surgery patients whose doctors had feared would need blood transfusion. A remarkable case was a journalist whose monthly cycle lingered beyond one month. One day, she fainted in a taxi on her way from her beat to the newsroom. The driver took her straight to a nearby clinic. When she returned to the office and I learned of her experience, I sent some one immediately to the Olonode Street health store of Pa Johnson, the father of Mobolaji Johnson, a former Military Governor of Lagos State, who was one of two persons then in Lagos who sold Apple Cider Vinegar(ACV). Pa Johnson sold liquid ACV. The other man, on Ogunlana drive, Surulere, sold ACV powder. The young woman’s bleeding stopped almost immediately she began to take ACV before meals. Many of my friends who had surgery for inguinal hernia or prostate gland enlargement have also profited from ACV therapy before their surgeries. I remember a woman who was going to have her uterus removed for multiple fibroid growths. The surgeons would not attend to her until the family had provided adequate stand by blood because they considered post-surgical transfusion inevitable. She was pale and weak, lifeless to say the least. I advised the family to place her on ACV before the surgery. She went through it without bleeding and transfusion. One recent case, in Etinan, Akwa Ibom State, was as unecessary as Hafsatu Yusuf’s, although it was only tangentially related to the labour room.

This death resulted from bleeding uterine fibroids. She was bleeding and lean. She came to Lagos for succour but had to return home because she had not enough money for medical treatment. Back home in the village, a naturopath provided an antidote. To her joy, the tumours came off and were expelled vaginally. However, she began to bleed profusely, was taken to hospital, and died. Her case makes a case for doctors and naturopaths to work together. In my mother’s case, the orthodox medical personnel may have kept aloof, like tin gods, whereas the plant called EWE ABIWERE (Easy Birth leaf) could have helped her. Botanists call this leaf Aybanthus enneaspermus. English folk medicine knows it as SPADE FLOWER or bird eye bush. It is used in various cultures for different purposes including iron deficiency anaemia.

In the days I used to spend some time with Mr Adeleke, the technologist at the pharmacognosy labouratory of the University of Lagos College of Medicine at Idi Araba, he often mentioned to me a professor of Medicine who inherited a soap from his father, a herbalist. Whenever a woman was in life threatening labour and he lathered it on her abdomen and pubic, the baby was born easily almost immediately. Since I heard of this professor, I often asked women who had need for his acumen to see him or Mr Adeleke.

I will ever remember the case of a 15-year- old in Uyo who was heavy with her first pregnancy. Her doctor said her birth passages were too narrow and she would require surgery to have the baby. Her family was poor and, so, sent her to a traditional birth attendant who was delivering many women of their babies. This mother at 15 scaled through without any ado!

One of the partnerships between tradition and modernity of the 1990s worth saluting even today was that between Mrs Elizabeth Kafaru’s Elikaf Clinics at Ogba, Lagos, and Adeiza Hospital of Dr Egbuna in Mushin, several kilometers away. Anytime women with uterine fibroids came to have them expelled through non invasive hand manipulation of skilled Ijaw women, a taxi was on stand by, if they began to bleed and it would be necessary to take them to hospital!

WRONG IMPRESSION

I appear to be saying only ACV stops or can stop bleeding. Healing mother Nature never stands on one prop. Shepherd’s   Purse heals internal bleeding. So does Lady’s Mantle which has the shape of the uterus and is, indeed, a uterine herb. I have witnessed it once bring down foetal content, and, so, prefer it more for building up uterine weight and strength before pregnancy.

Nimosa Pudica is another herb for stopping bleeding. The Yorubas call it PATANMO, OKO RE MBO. The universal name in this culture is PATANMO. It means...”sheath your lap”. This is a common admonition or counsel for women who sit carelessly, legs ajar. The rest of the name, OKORE MBO, is an embellishment of PATANMO and means...”your husband is coming”. The HERB obtained its graphic name from its responses to touch. Its two rows of leaves expose themselves to sunlight when they are not impacted. To touch, they fold or fall immediately on each other. This is, perhaps, a signature tune that the plant is not only a nervine, that is a nerve plant, but is, also, an astringent herb. In bleeding, connective tissues are weak, probably from a deficiency of VITAMIN C, as in scurvy and bleeding gums. An astringent agent is required to shut the apertures and stop the bleeding. This plant does exactly that. We shouldn’t forget Pawpaw (papaya) leaf which stops bleeding through another mechanism. In “dengue fever”, caused by aedes aegypti and aedes albopictus mosquitoes, patients may bleed from all openings in the human body...eyes, ears, mouth, anus and the urogenital outlets in men and women. In pawpaw leaf therapy, to address such bleeding, certain substances support production of platelet cells which stick together to form clots at the sites of broken tissue to prevent blood leaks.

There is yet another possible bleeding cure I would like to mention. Orthodox doctors and Western Type hospital may not wish to hear of it. It is not URINE THERAPY which I witnessed was fabulous for the bleeding breasts of Shakirat Adeoti, the then 33-year-old microbiology graduate of the University of Ife. She suffered from bleeding cancer in both breasts. Her doctors wanted to “blast” her ovaries, that is prevent them from producing estrogen which they believed, was fuelling the cancer. She did not like this because she longed to be married someday to her doting, boyfriend and bear their children. I was touched about this when Mrs Dorcas Akintoye brought her to me as a writer on natural medicines. I took her to a doctor acquaintance of mine who declined to be her doctor because he was not an ONCOLOGIST. So, she ended up with a compassionate ONCOLOGIST at LUTH who did not mind that she support his chemotherapy prescriptions with natural medicines. That was understandable because he took his degrees in medicine after a first degree in pharmacy.

Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu was Governor of Lagos State then. He read of her plight in The Comet newspaper and gave her N1 million cash gift for her hospital bills. His wife, Oluremi, gave her N250,000. Shakirat’s classmates at the University of Ife made generous contributions to a fund in her name.

Where I am going is what we may call a strange medicine recommended by Dr HCA Vogel, for healing bleeding of worst case scenarios.

Before I mention it, please permit that I mention how, in tight corners, we stopped Shakirat’s breast bleeding. Her younger sister, who gave up school for one or two years to nurse her, would wee in a clean jar and bathe the wound site with it, and the bleeding would stop.This would be difficult to apply on a bleeding uterus which may do well on those herbs aforementioned and more since they are blessed with generous amounts of Vitamin K2, a hospital remedy.

DR H.C.A VOGEL

He is the author of Nature Doctor which comprehensively discussed several common ailments and natural remedies against them. He travelled worldwide, including to Africa, learning how different peoples treated diseases with natural remedies.

One of the remedies Dr Vogel suggested for haemophilia is tormentil, a herb which also helps to stop diarrhoea and intestinal health challenges.

Tormentil (Potentilla erecta) is high in chemical substances called tannins. They constrict tissues and permanently seal small blood vessels through their astringent activity. In hemophilia, they act as supportive, natural drying agents to reduce bleeding frequency and intensity, and improve coagulation.

What may come as a surprise to many surgeons and doctors was a report by Dr Vogel of how fresh and warm chicken tissue stopped the bleeding of an haemophiliac undergoing surgery. Hemophiliacs suffer from hemophelia, a condition in which their blood does not clot and may make them bleed to death. A hemophiliac was undergoing surgery and began to bleed, reports Dr VOGEL. A lay person had advised them to get a live chicken, kill it, pull the feathers and, while the naked flesh was still warm, place it directly on the bleeding site. It worked. The bleeding stopped.

On page 5 of the 1990 edition of his book published in Great Britain by mainstream publishing company ISBN (1815158 274 6.), a copy of which I still have in my library, Dr VOGEL wrote:

“If you know someone who frequently suffers from heavy nose bleeds, or who is a “bleeder”, any advice will be welcome. What can you do if the bleeding will not stop because the normal clotting ability is impaired? This can be a serious problem unless you know that applying a piece of fresh  rawchickren is the only natural remedy to stop the bleeding if it is caused by Haemophila. However, if it is only a temporary disturbance, it can be effectively dealt with by means of a herb called tormentil. The Nature doctor will inform you fully a little later on”.

Then on page 461, after a preliminary report on page 460 of how a mother saved the leg of her son with fresh chicken fat after an axe was driven into his knee, Dr VOGEL added:

“The doctor, whom the family finally succeeded in contacting, could only come the following morning. As an experienced travelling country doctor, he did not consider the chicken fat treatment strange and appeared well satisfied with the young man’s condition. He took the patient with him to the hospital for surgical treatment and in a short time the leg was completely healed. The mother was convinced that she had saved her boy’s life by running on the fat as soon as the blood poisoning became evident.

“Some doctors may smile or scoff when reading about such simple natural remedies. However, they should not forget that these remedies have been known and used for hundreds of years and have outlasted many a modern chemical drugs. These natural remedies are always near at hand and invariably provide help when other remedies fail. They will continue to do so long after many of the present day products of the pharmaceutical industry have been discarded and forgotten.

“No less interesting is the story I heard from a Berlin doctor who was attached to the famous hospital ‘charite’. A person suffering from Haemophila had to have a minor operation and the doctors were worried about stopping the bleeding. A peasant who was a patient in the hospital happened to hear of their anxiety and when one of the doctors was making his rounds, he told him in his blunt rustic way that he knew of something that would stop the bleeding and was better than all the strong-smelling ointments in the hospital.

The doctor, who had formerly been a country practitioner for many years and had often obtained valuable information from his patients, did not ignore such words but asked, “well, what would you say was good for stopping bleeding”?

‘Chicken would help, Doc, but it must be absolutely fresh and warm’, replied the peasant, and the conversation ended there.

“ However, the doctor did obtain a chicken before the operation, although perhaps more out of curiousity as to what would happen if he truly used it. After collision treatment and everything else had failed to stop the bleeding, as a last resort, he cut a piece from the chicken and laid it while still warm on the patient’s small incision, which was still bleeding. As if by magic, before the eyes of the other doctors, the bleeding stopped”.

JOBELYN

To conclude the first part of this 2-part series, I will like to mention that JOBELYN may have helped Hafsatu Yusuf. Doctor Victor Umoh, formerly of Durosoleye hospital on Allen Avenue, Ikeja, Lagos, rushed into Lagos from Ajaokuta some decades ago to buy Jobelyn for one of the patients at his Ajaokuta hospital. She was a Jehovah witness. She was an ectopic pregnancy patient and dying from anaemia. She and her family declined blood transfusion, as Jehovah Witnesses are known to do. Doctor Umoh intravenously gave her Jobelyn because she was too weak to swallow tablets. She survived! Sometime last year, an octogenerian reader of this column from Benin came to have knee cap replacement surgery in Lagos. All pre surgery tests went well. She came out of the surgery with substantial blood loss. She was to receive blood transfusion every third day or so. She didn’t like it and called me. I asked her to take the first because her eyes turned and she almost fell when she tried to get down from the bed. Her brother’s wife gave her Jobelyn and beetroot water extract almost every six hours and she did not need any transfusion afterwards, to the surprise of her doctors.