A True Story From Ghana
"I Thought I Was Going To Die Before My Daughter's Wedding"
"For seven years, I lived in a prison. Not the kind with walls. The kind that lives inside your body."
My name is Kwame Asante. I am 54 years old and I live in Kumasi. In 2016, my doctor told me I had Type 2 diabetes. I remember sitting in that chair and feeling the whole room move.
I had watched my uncle suffer with diabetes for years before he lost his leg. He died two years after the amputation. I was at his funeral. I wept for him. I never imagined that one day, I would be sitting in a doctor's office hearing the same news.
The doctor handed me a prescription and a long list of things I could not eat anymore. He told me I would need to take medication every day for the rest of my life. I walked out of that hospital like a man who had just been sentenced.
My wife Abena stopped cooking the foods I loved. No more fufu with groundnut soup on Sundays. No more white rice with stew. No more ripe plantain. I sat at the table, watched my children eat, and felt like a stranger in my own home.
My daughter Efua would look at me with eyes full of pity. I hated that look. I am her father. I was supposed to be her strong, invincible father.
About four months after that phone call, I went to visit my old friend Kofi in Takoradi. He took one look at me and said: "Kwame, you don't look well at all."
When I finished telling him everything, he went to his room and came back with a package. "I have been using this for three months," he said. "My sugar has been coming down. My doctor was surprised at my last test."
It was called 2in1 Diabetwash. I was skeptical. I had tried herbal remedies before. But Kofi looked different. He looked alive. There was a steadiness in his eyes.
By the second week, something small happened. I woke up on a Thursday morning and I had only gone to the toilet once during the night. My sugar reading was the lowest it had been in months.
By the end of the second month, my energy had returned. I was sleeping through the night. My doctor looked at my test results, was quiet for a long moment, and then said: "Mr. Asante, what have you been doing differently?" He adjusted my medication downward.
That was the day I sat in my car in the hospital car park and wept. But this time, the tears were different. These were not tears of fear. These were tears of a man beginning to believe again.
When the pastor announced them as husband and wife, Kwame looked at his wife across the aisle. They were both weeping. Not from sadness. From relief. From gratitude. From freedom.
