By Victor Enengedi
Ailing producer, songwriter and singer, OJB Jezreel needs N16m for an urgent kidney transplant. Friends and colleagues have rallied round him since word got out last week. And he says all the outpour of love has strengthened his desire to live…
Can you please clarify – what exactly is wrong with you?
It is a renal disease also known as kidney failure. Both of my kidneys are gone and I definitely need a transplant.
When were you diagnosed of the ailment?
That was about two years ago when we discovered and since that period, we had been battling it on our own. What was shocking was that, many years back, I cracked a joke that if something goes wrong, ‘na on your own I dey oh’. And then for two years I have been battling this on my own.
While you were silently going through this how was your family handling it?
All the while this was happening, there were the ones that were there. The ones that saw the weakness, they were the ones that saw the period where I couldn’t get up from bed, where they had to carry me to go and shower, take me to the bathroom and toilet. They saw all that, the outside world didn’t see that. The OJB that could even walk and talk now is an improvement.
All the time you were getting treatment, was it that the treatment wasn’t effective?
As at that point in time, it was like a case of having high blood pressure affecting the renal system. But after a while, I was having lapses. The lapses were coming and going. After a while, when I have the lapses, they stay longer. Like may be I have four days lapses and then get better until like may be another 5-6 months. But it got to a point the lapses got worse, it was becoming very frequent like I was experiencing it every other week, and then every other day.
How does it feel to see that people are this much concerned about you?
For some reason you find stronger reasons in life to live. The fact that you see that people actually love and care about you, that’s enough reason to want to live. But when you are alone, you think about, ‘what if I die, well, whatever’, and that’s it. So for these people, I’m ready to live.
