Bad News, Good News

By Mustapha Shehu


It was bad news yet it was good for Bala Abdul, when he saw the nine-inch slit on his abdomen and the colostomy bag dangling from his side at the Long Beach Community Hospital.

“The person upstairs is looking after you” the doctor told him. “You are lucky.”

“What…?” Abdul wanted to ask but his voice faltered as he peeped over his chest in the delirium of the waning anesthesia to take a look at the bandage.

Abdul, a 30-year-old was brought to the hospital from the apartment he shared with a fellow graduate student at the California State University.

“I was hale and hearty after we returned from a workshop at Stanford University,” Abdul said with a furrow on his forehead. “Then I woke up the following morning with an excruciating abdominal pain.”

His apartment mate called an ambulance and he was rushed to the hospital.

He was groaning with pain as the doctors examined him using the hospital’s hi-tech CT scan diagnostic equipment.

“We have seen nothing,” the lead doctor had said.

But Abdul was still in pains. Excruciating pain.

“I can’t bear the pain anymore,” Abdul said, his face contorted. Then he fainted.

The doctors decided to go for exploratory surgery. They rushed Abdul to the operating theater where they cut him open and there was the cause of his pain.

His intestines had ruptured and its contents had oozed into his abdominal cavity causing an infection.

“He wouldn’t have lived another three hours” the doctor had said.

The doctors slashed Abdul’s intestines by four inches and stitched the two ends. They bypassed his normal excretory channel and attached a colostomy bag to his side to empty his wastes. They did not stitch him up because they did not want to have to open him up again to re-establish his normal excretory route when the intestinal surgery wounds healed. The slit tummy was instead held by clips in three places and blanketed with lubricated cotton gauze.

“I was frightened the way I never was in my entire life when I came back to consciousness after the surgery and saw my tummy open,” Abdul said. “I thought the doctors had opened me up and found that my case was hopeless and left me open to my fate.”

But then the doctor gently broke the news to him.

“The bad news is we had to open you up and you will remain open and carry the colostomy bag for six months,” the doctor said, “The good news however is that you would have died of peritonitis if we hadn’t opened you up.”

Abdul convalesced at home while a nurse came twice daily to clean and dress his wound. He could only drink soup a little at time and so lost more than one-third of his weight.

“My wife was so afraid I was going to die, she left me” Abdul said.

Six months after, Abdul returned to surgery where the doctors removed the colostomy and restored his normal excretory route and stitched him up.

It is 17 years now and neither Abdul nor the doctors know exactly why his intestines had ruptured.