I can vividly remember the time when I had persistent headaches, and my body usually felt like I was flogged with a rod of correction. I will wake up in the morning and feel so drained, as if I did hard labor in my dreamland. What about my mood? I was feeling unusual, always with a low energy, as if there is no life in me anymore.
People constantly questioned my low energy and kept saying, Nkem, this is unlike you. Give us your extrovert vibes, lol, and stuff like that. You can't check my room without finding cards of paracetamol, and each card takes me just a few days to exhaust them all. It was that bad and was becoming a routine to the point that once I visited the pharmacy store, the guy in charge already knew why I visited. At one point, he advised that I add multivitamins to the headache drugs I was buying, and I did. Did I get better after taking the vitamins? No! Of course, the headaches persisted, I checked for typhoid and other possible causes of it, but the result showed negative. That was when I really sat down to reflect on my lifestyle.
Then, the highest sleep I could get in a day was roughly 4 hours. I was always jumping from one activity to another, one job to another, one chore to another, and one church program to another, including online night programs from one society in the church to another. I am the type they love to really get active in whatever I get myself involved in, forgetting that I am only but a human and not a robot. I had to review my lifestyle and cut off some activity, even though it was important, but my health is in line. No one can do any activity in the grave, right? It was a necessary action I took.
Some people started calling me and said, Nkem, we didn't see you in our program today; it's unlike you. What happened? Blablabla. The truth was that, a lot of times, I even forgot myself. I could hardly have time to eat good food. Imagine not eating well and not sleeping well—that's a bad combo!
But there was a shift! ...
I embraced a new lifestyle; I suspended activities that usually encroached on my bedtime and started sleeping well, getting at least 7-8 hours of sleep per day. I stopped skipping my meals unnecessarily and ate good food, spent my HBDs, and felt alrighty, lolz... I only visited the gym once, but I don't fail to do a little exercise daily.
...in fact, it has become part of me, and I started feeling like I am rebranded and rehabilitated, lolz.
There was no need to visit the drugstore constantly like before anymore, no more medication, and yet, I felt okay. A new version of me emerged with just a simple lifestyle that I chose to live.
The experience taught me that indeed, not everything is solved by medication; sometimes it could just be a change of lifestyle, and we are good to go!
This is my response to the #HiveLearners community contest on the topic titled, NO MORE MEDICATION.