Do cool mums breastfeed?

Posted on August 17, 2013 by chatwithdrketch

It was World Breast feeding week last week and this event got my mind racing down memory lane. A few years ago when I was pregnant for my first child, I made plans…loads of them. How great a mother I was going to be, I would make packed lunches, make her hair, teach her, school her, take her to work with me, (so I could exclusively breast feed), take her to school by myself (when it was that time), pick her up too, do her laundry by myself etc. I wanted to be super mum. All those statistics of mothers who left their children etc., was never going to be me or my child. 

And so, I birthed this child. And, I set about doing all the things I had planned to do with a vengeance! I had no help…I insisted on doing everything myself, (never mind that by the end of the day I was frazzled, at my wits end and willing to bite people’s ears off, if they so much as grazed past me, how much more touch a raw nerve!) I also started looking for that hospital where I would work with my baby. I had just finished med school, house job and NYSC at that time, and so my head was brimming with all those ideas of bonding with my baby by breast feeding and also ensuring I was giving her immune system a great boost for life…and all those wonderful reasons we were given for breast feeding. In fact, as I was leaving med school, I was convinced that breast feeding was cool and oh so, fashionable! But the whole world conspired against me and all those noble ideals I had. I couldn’t find any hospital that felt I was truly serious about working and discussing the concept of bringing my baby in and having a crèche where I could take off, now and again to breast feed and bond :D. In fact, none of those hospitals had crèches for their nursing-mother employees! Oh! Years later, I can imagine them bursting into gales of laughter anytime I left any of those interviews. ‘Can you imagine? She wants to work…with a baby?!’ ‘Is she for real?!’

And so started my reluctant stay-at-home period! It was to be for about 2 years. By this time, I had finally ‘wised’ up and figured that the society wanted mothers to breast feed their children, bond with them and reduce crime rates etc., but no one was willing to make the sacrifice to make that happen. And so, I made plans to put my daughter in school only to realise I was pregnant again. With my second daughter, breast feeding was perfunctory as I spent the period of pregnancy and immediately after birth plotting my return to the work place. 

Having tried exclusive breast feeding and partial breast feeding, the difference was clear. Where my first daughter was a pillar of health during childhood, my second baby…though not sickly, always looked pale, picked up every virus flying around in the air and wasn’t the easiest child to adapt to new diets etc.

Having experienced both extremes and becoming convinced about what made sense for me as a mother, I determined that with my next baby, I was going to work, (the housewife thing was not working for me. I was plain miserable! I doff my hat to all housewives! You’re all amazing women and you rock!) and I was going to breast feed. And guess what? That was exactly what I did! I would breast feed at home and express regularly to freeze for the periods I was away at work. It wasn’t easy but it was certainly worth it! So is it possible for a working mother? It is. 

I smile when I hear working mothers say, ‘but I work, how can I do that?’ You can, but it requires some sacrifice…actually lots of sacrifice. 

Breast milk, beyond being cheap, temperature regulated and readily available 🙂 is formulated with everything your baby needs for each stage of his growth. It’s chock full of immunoglobulins (which makes them resistant to illnesses , vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats and oils. So, it is indeed a complete meal! It also helps the womb to return to normal size after childbirth.

So ladies, let’s give our children the right start. It is still fashionable to breast feed. (And even if not, who cares about what the fashion radar is saying on that, anyways?! Or better still, let’s start the fad!)

Employers please encourage this practice that is useful to society as a whole…crèches aren’t such a bad idea when you think about the fact that you would now have dedicated female employees working for you.

PS: Ladies get some help at home. You know that ‘super mum’ thing I was trying to do? It just exhausts you and you can’t get it all done. Get a washing machine or someone to do the laundry. If you don’t want a live-in help, get a daily. But whatever you do, get help! You’ll be a lot happier. Trust me, I know!

Here’s to a healthier, happier…and less stressed out you!

Dr Ketch

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Hygiene is two thirds of health!

Posted on August 10, 2013 by chatwithdrketch

Who would believe a thing like that? Like…seriously? Isn’t this like taking the cliche ‘an ounce of prevention is better than an ounce of care’ too far? Or perhaps the more commonly known ‘prevention is better than cure’? But guess what? It is true…so true that it is amazing the number of diseases that are spread by the very lack of this ‘common sense’ virtue, if I may pre-suppose to call it that.

A few weeks ago in May, the World Hand washing Day was celebrated and it was an opportunity to further WHO’s campaign of ‘save lives…wash your hands’. Studies have shown how the introduction of simple hygiene like just washing of hands has been able to halve the prevalence of childhood illnesses like diarrhoea and respiratory infections. This clearly means that our hygiene status plays a significant role in determining our health and even the health of others. Food for thought!

Hygiene, described as practices and activities that lead to maintenance of health and prevention of diseases, for the purposes of our discourse, is divided into four:

Personal hygiene which covers the realm of taking a bath, washing clothes, washing our hands, not transferring our germs to other people by blowing our nose appropriately etc.

Have you considered the fact that hand washing without soap actually translates to smearing the germs all over your hands and giving them a wider surface area to operate or that not washing well enough or long enough means that we’ve got live germs on our hands ready to transfer to our foods, friends we shake or even people we hug…heaven forbid if this were to be a young child with a still-developing immune system.

Do you know that the more you wear an outfit before you wash it, the more germs breed on it making it difficult to get rid of them all in one laundry cycle? Let’s even ignore the smell that other people are confronted with as a result of dried sweat on these clothes 😀 And do you know that contrary to popular belief, air drying is not better than tumble drying as air drying provides the germs a longer breeding time before they are completely dried, if at all.

You do know that you should wash your hands after handling dirty laundry because…well, because it’s dirty, right? Consider this though. The same should be done after touching wet washed laundry as, depending on how dirty they were, before laundry, they could still have germs all over their surface. Scary, right?

Remember to wash your ‘delicates’ and always damp clothing differently. Undies and towels should be washed separately from general laundry. Towels by their constant wet nature are a perfect breeding place for germs.

If you’ve got a washing machine, please use hot or warm water to wash. You’ve got a better chance of killing those germs on clothes. This same dictum applies for hand washing too.

Hygiene at home: this covers sweeping and cleaning different areas in the home (toilet, bathroom, bedroom etc)

Have you visited any of those toilets or bathrooms that have fluid and all sorts of dirty stuff o the floor? It appears in these places that because we do the ‘dirty business’ in the toilets and bathrooms, they have no business being clean. It is disgusting though to have to step around (if that were even possible) all of that liquid not knowing where they came from or indeed what they were used for. Toilets and bathrooms need to be wiped down every day and disinfected because, naturally they provide a wet environment for germs to thrive. And please try to use more pleasant smelling disinfectants that give the toilets a better ambience. Even some drops of bleach in the cleaning water is a better idea than those concentrated horrible smelling disinfectants from the 1st century! Don’t ask me which ones….I plead the 5th amendment (and yes I know I am not an American :D).

Food hygiene: this involves preparation of food for cooking, storage of food in pantries and refrigerators, food handling, prevention of cross-contamination etc.

If you bake, have you ever considered that the bowl of cake mix that you liberally lick from after scooping into cake pans is dangerous to your health? It contains raw eggs which are a rich source of salmonella. Food poisoning can result from this.

For those of you with cosmopolitan palates who love raw meat a la tartare, or raw fish a la sushi, well be careful :). Worms present in fish can survive in the intestines of man and cause an infection. It is far harder for the germs to cause lasting infection of meat as any of them on the surface is quickly killed by cooking. If meat is minced though, this becomes a bit more difficult as every ‘grain’ of meat has to be heated all the way through to kill any surface germ that may have been on the meat.

Have you ever thought about the cross contamination that happens in a lot of kitchens? Do you use different surfaces or chopping boards for your raw meat and for other foods? For most people, chicken and other meat produce are prepared in one section of the kitchen and then other food items are quickly plunked down for preparation on the same surface immediately afterwards without cleaning or indeed without using different surfaces for raw meat and other foods.

Pet Hygiene: this involves keeping our pets safe, proper disposal of their poop and also protecting us from contacting any disease that can be spread from animals to humans.

So here’s hoping this has stirred up some thoughts as to things we take for granted that affect our health and how we can do them differently so that we are healthier. Children have to be taught these things at an early stage to ensure that they grow up doing the right thing. I knew a couple once who had a quarreled over how often children’s clothes should be washed. The man argued that if they are not visibly dirty, they do not need to be washed (and what’s body odour? Everybody smells, right?!) and that clothes do not need to be ironed but can be placed under the pillows to straighten out 😀

Whatcha think?

Here’s to a healthier you.

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Descent into the dark ages? Heaven forbid!!!

Posted on July 21, 2013 by chatwithdrketch

Nigerian movies are replete with scenes of wives fighting girl friends or second wives of husbands, boyfriends or significant others. We watch sometimes and put it all down to theatrics…especially, the ‘if I catch him, I will kill him, kill and then kill myself’ dictum. I’ve never understood how all the killing, literally or figuratively solves any problem. But one thing that none of us can quarrel with is the raw emotion that is felt when one is confronted by this scene…it can make one commit a serious crime and indeed plead ‘temporary insanity’ in court. This is one end of the spectrum.

The other end, in my book, equally as serious and perhaps more emotion laden, is the feeling experienced by a parent should they ever be in the unfortunate position of knowing that their child has been ‘defiled’ or even put in a compromising position by an older person who should know better. The rage, the emotions, the momentary craziness/madness can only be imagined. God forbid that any of us be placed in this situation. These children are meant to be protected, treasured, moulded, taught etc. With this singular act, they lose faith in mankind and begin to see the world through jaded eyes. The psychological impact is also not lost on us. They sometimes never recover from this and regard every member of the opposite sex with fear and suspicion.

Should this ‘defilement’ end up with a pregnancy or perhaps a Sexually Transmitted Infection, then it becomes an even more painful episode that can’t be easily moved on from (as if that were possible even without these added complications).

For the pregnancy in these ‘young’ mothers, several complications are just lurking round the corner including the most popular Vesico vaginal Fistula. This is a situation in which urine leaks constantly from an abnormal connection between the urinary bladder and the vagina. These patients have a persistent smell of urine all around and over them. They are pariah in the society…perhaps the same society that looked on happily when they were being defiled.

Other complications include the emotional immaturity of dealing with the MANY needs of a child, the risk of having low birth weight babies, pre-term babies, high blood pressure, anaemia etc.

What parent would allow their child to go through this without wrathfully doing something or indeed look blissfully on while this happens? In other climes, this is regarded as pedophilia and indeed, offenders are punished with the full wrath of the law.

So where is my dear country missing the point? If marriage confers adulthood on a child, then at what point in her childhood is this marriage allowed to be contracted? Is there a ‘grey zone’ before marriage and then immediately afterwards, everyone understands that this is legal and the child becomes an adult? Can a 6 year old get married and immediately become an adult? So the ‘child’ is a child at the point of marriage (at which point I believe the marriage can be stopped and the person pursuing this liaison sued?) and immediately becomes an adult after the marriage (at which time, person in question cannot be sued and perhaps if there is a subsisting matter in court, it could be thrown out for being inappropriate since the child is now an adult?) I’m absolutely confused. Questions and questions…painful questions and even more painful soliloquy!

Let’s not give dirty old men an excuse to look at our daughters in inappropriate ways and not have all the books of law in the world thrown at them! Or vice versa…

The social implications of this are terrifying but the health implications are even more horrifying! I sincerely hope we don’t take this giant step of infamy into the dark ages…that we haven’t even fully left. SMH!!!

Here’s to a healthier generation…and a healthier you!

Dr Ketch

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Can you give the gift of life?

Posted on July 15, 2013 by chatwithdrketch

What does having the power to give the gift of life mean? Is it the birthing of a baby, as a great percentage of women are able to do? Is it the role the men and women play in the miracle of conception? Is it the role of doctors in being able to take life and death decisions that affect their patients? The list could go on forever and I guess in some ways these different people play major roles in determining life at some point or the other.  

I take a few seconds to issue a quick disclaimer that this concept of giving the gift of life is very different from playing God. Only God can play God :D. The rest of us? We only play roles he has prescribed. A friend of mine would say cynically, ‘if men were God…’

Back to the discourse; is this role of giving the gift of life something that you would associate with yourself? Not a doctor, maybe not male, or even if female, no child etc. So perhaps you think this probably doesn’t refer to you. But guess what? It does! You absolutely have the ability to give the gift of life and not just in the ways I mentioned above. You can donate your blood and save somebody else’s life!

It might appear to casual on-lookers that this is a ‘no-brainer-not-a-problem, ‘the-blood-banks-should-be-filled-with-blood’ kinda situation, but I guess that perhaps only the medics and parents/people who have witnessed the frantic calling, running around and utter confusion that is the scenario when blood is needed for a patient (perhaps a sickler, a pregnant woman or even a newly born baby) and can’t be found, can understand! Lots of lives have been lost due to lack of blood in banks. Perhaps you understand now why some hospitals insist on having the husband’s of pregnant women donate blood during the course of their wives’ ANC whether they would need it or not. Probably their innovative way of getting ‘voluntary’ donors! 😀

Let me digress a bit from the disturbing imagery of blood search to a bit of history. There is a bit of confusion about the exact person who performed the first blood transfusion (Jean-Baptiste Denys or Richard Lower) but all the controversies agree that this was done in 1667. They must have been real geniuses, thinking out of the box and making a difference to the very future of medicine apart from the life they saved. As most ‘firsts’ are, it was a crude procedure using sheep’s blood!!! It was a miracle that the patient survived but subsequent procedures using same blood were not so successful.

Away from history to the present, you can also make a difference. Become a voluntary ‘unpaid’ blood donor. You will be doing more good than you even know. We all like to do good even if this is seasonal for a greater percentage of people :D, during festive seasons with visits to the motherless babies’ homes etc. Let’s make doing good more fashionable and ‘in-season’ all the time. 

It doesn’t matter your blood group. People with blood group ‘O’ are known as universal donors and people with blood group AB are known as universal acceptors. Thus, blood groups O+, O-, AB- and B- are always in hot demand. Even if you don’t have any of these ‘fashionable’ 😉 blood groups, your donation still counts. You have to be at least 17 years or over, in good health with a healthy blood count and weigh more than 50kg, you can donate whole blood every 56 days and your blood will be screened for viruses and bacteria. If you’re female, please don’t donate while menstruating or soon after. We don’t want to drain the life out of you, do we? 😀 

So what are you waiting for? Let’s play our parts in saving other people’s lives; we may very well be saving ours as that guy or lady who needs a blood donation tomorrow might very well be you. As the lotto advert goes, who knows, ‘e fit be you oh!’

Here’s to a healthier generation and a healthier you!

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Hang tough…don’t puff!

Posted on July 6, 2013 by chatwithdrketch

When I was younger, the picture of a cool guy wasn’t complete without a cigarette in his hands. Then, if he had a cigar, men, that was hyper ultra cool! He would usually be seen leaning on a cool car, with lots of other dudes hanging on to his words and pretty girls dying to be given the eye by him. In fact, some television adverts for cigarettes would go so far as to show how with puffs of cigarettes, a regular guy not only becomes super-cool but also becomes a super athlete, star etc. Do they actually possess these powers? Hmmm!

It was World No Tobacco day a few weeks back. It really went by quietly with not much noise; I think I just caught a tiny paragraph in the newspaper where a company exec from one of the tobacco companies talked about how much they were doing in terms of corporate social responsibility. The focus for this year’s celebration was banning tobacco advertising: ‘Ban tobacco advertising, sponsorship and promotion’. The tobacco companies, to be fair to them, actually note on the packs that smokers are likely to die young. But I’ve always thought the adverts were not really telling us anything. Die from what exactly? People who cross the roads without looking are likely to die young; people who do not use the pedestrian crossings and instead choose to cross the expressway are likely to die young, any person who falls in front of a fast moving train will most certainly die, young or old 😀 etc. In fact, my friends delight in telling me whenever I sound sanctimonious that ‘ na something go kill person’. These are the adult, almost ‘ossified’ fossils like me :D.

For the younger ones, repercussions that are too far in the future are difficult to comprehend today when they are all hip and cool. The talk of all the consequences is kinda like lots of smoke without fire! And the tobacco companies have also gotten innovative, they take the advert to where the young ones actually hang out. The time of discovering tobacco is about the same time that alcohol is discovered and so the young ‘uns are hanging around bars and night clubs ( I thought there were age limits for admission? :O). This is where the tobacco companies go and they have a huge and captive audience.

Tobacco use has a lot of health implications and has been noted as a risk factor in lung diseases, heart diseases and cancers. This may appear to be too far in the future and difficult for our teenagers who are in their prime to contemplate. So, perhaps educating them about more short to medium term consequences may be helpful. Some of these include:

  • Reduced fitness levels…making them appear old and fuddy-duddy! They can’t even join the cool sports teams.
  • Nasty smelling breath that even tooth paste, breath mints and candy cannot mask.
  • Becoming unattractive to non-smoking peers
  • Stained teeth and fingers
  • Wasting money that could be used for clothes, music or other items
  • Finally, the fact that the teenager loses control and can’t stop smoking once addiction to nicotine appears.

I had a very close relation who smoked…a lot. He also drank…a lot. He eventually died with complications of hypertension, Diabetes Mellitus, liver cirrhosis and lung disease. Granted, there was a whole lot more going on than just the smoking but it’s now a case of which came first, ‘the cart or the horse’. I don’t know but I can surely tell you that smoking didn’t help him any. Tobacco use is a major preventable cause of death world wide. The reasons for tobacco use are many and diverse, but in a nutshell, appears to be a way from which people attempt to escape stress and the pressures of life. So the campaign for eradicating smoking goes beyond the individual and involves the Government which must provide the right socio-economic support for the issues people stress out about. Having said that, we also have a role to play.

For the adult smokers, there has to be a clear desire to quit and so being positive, being around supportive people and avoiding the areas where one usually is encouraged to smoke, are steps in the right direction. Getting other hobbies, switching to oral substitutes like chewing gum, carrots and mints are also helpful. Brushing your teeth often is also a good idea as toothpaste makes cigarette taste really bad…so I hear 😉

Methinks though that the best way to discourage your teenagers from smoking is by setting a good example. They learn much more from what we do than from what we say.

So guys, I say, ‘let’s tar our roads, not our lungs!’

Here’s to a healthier you!

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Love is blind…is it?

Posted on June 29, 2013 by chatwithdrketch

Did you enjoy reading Mills and Boon and all about falling in love in those good old days? The dashing tall, dark and handsome men who were to charge into our lives with panache and sweep us off our feet (drool). Some of us got these our ‘Prince Charmings’ (on white horses, to boot) and some of us not. But, hey hold it…this post is not about that!

It is about the things that love supposedly makes us do! I checked up an online dictionary and it defines love as an intense feeling of deep affection. Hmm! Then I went a step further and checked up the meaning of blindness and this online source tells me that this is a state of being sightless and unable to see. So, if love is blind, it prevents anyone with this feeling of deep affection from seeing…literally and figuratively! Hmm, thought to ponder. I’ll leave this discourse here for a bit and move on to another issue.

Parenthood is a huge job. It involves a human being literally sacrificing all for another. You want to protect your children from pain, hurts, losses etc even when you know it is impossible. When they are ill, you want to take over the illness and leave them well. So imagine if you were the parent of a sickler, who has to deal with crises after crises, in pain and really sickly most of the time. You’re constantly praying to God to please let this crisis pass, please reduce the pain and indeed you are in the hospital more often than not with this child.

How did this happen? Well it was when two sickle trait carriers (people with AS) decided to get married. This automatically meant that for each pregnancy, they had a 25% chance that the baby would be born with genotype SS. This is a mathematical probability and so it could very well be that none of this couple’s children would be SS or it could very well be that all or half of them could be SS! So imagine starting out on a journey of parenthood knowing that your heart is going to be broken again and again as you deal with your child’s continual visits in and out of a hospital.

Now where does this link up with the first? It was World Sickle Cell day, afew days back and it got me wondering about this thing called love.Well, methinks that love should not be blind…not in these days where there are all sorts of sources for generating power :D. More seriously, love really has no choice than to be pragmatic these days. And so before marriage, a couple should be sure to carry out tests. I’m not talking about those carried out by churches to confirm pregnancy at al 😉 but a serious desire by couples to seek answers as they make the decision to undertake a voyage together. This should ideally be done or known by both parties early enough in a relationship before emotional investments are made on either side. 

If two people are carriers of the sickle cell trait, it is only pragmatic not to marry. Before you all lynch me, I know it is not as easy as it sounds. But marrying because you’re emotionally invested is really exchanging one type of heart break for another…because your heart will surely break when you have to watch your child go through the pains of the many crises he or she has to deal with or have them die in your hands. 

If I were to choose, I most definitely know what the choice would be for me. It may not be an easy choice but we’ve got to break the trend of these increasing numbers of sicklers in our communities. If ignorance is the problem, let’s spread the knowledge; if love being blind is the problem, ladies and gentlemen, please bring a flashlight along and show the light!

Here’s to a healthier generation and a healthier you!

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Daddy or Father…which are you?

Posted on June 22, 2013 by chatwithdrketch

It was Fathers’ day on Sunday and people rolled out the drums to celebrate  fathers, dead or alive. Mine unfortunately is dead…but the memories linger on (sigh!)

Methinks it was also a time for sober reflection. Am I a father or a daddy? Now before I start with my definitions, let me quickly issue the disclaimer that the definitions I am about to give probably do not exist in any other dictionary available as at today or planned for the future, except ‘the Dr Ketch book of stuff and things’ (copyright reserved :D). There! That’s done. On to the business of the day!

As I was going to say, a father is…well, one who fathers a child. In other words he provides the counterpart chromosome for a baby to be made. A bit like counterpart funding for a project :D. This doesn’t require much in terms of time, emotion, focus etc. Anyone can do this. This man is not invested in any way in his children’s lives: financially, emotionally, physically, socially, mentally and the list goes on. He’s an occasional father! He probably presents the children for photo opportunities whenever he feels it looks good and can give him a leg up, if you get what I mean 😉

But then, there’s daddy! Daddy is a special being! He’s the one who saw mummy through the pregnancy and ensured she was physically and emotionally healthy by ensuring she attended ante natal classes, took her ANC drugs and reduced her work burden. Daddy, it was who stood by mummy when the labour pains came and she had to get to the hospital. Daddy it was who stood by mum when it was time to push and practically pushed with her until the precious bundle of joy was birthed. From that time, daddy played an even more active role. Changing diapers, playing and bonding with baby, attending PTA meetings, concerts and recitals even when all that was on offer was a cacophony of screeching voices (if you get what I mean :D); in fact daddy would get up and say, ‘that’s my baby over there’ with such pride that people would look and shake their heads with a mixture of pity (that he found anything sonorous about the voices he was hearing) and amusement (at his very clearly evident love!). Daddy would attend these events, re-scheduling meetings just so he could be there and openly chastise other ‘very-busy-I-am-very-important-and-don’t-have-time-for-these-events’ fathers for not doing so! Is it any wonder that the children grew up, socially, emotionally and mentally healthy knowing the exact role model they needed for life and the choices they had to make?

So where do you fall in? Daddy or father? You be the judge or perhaps, history will help you out!

Talking about history, this piece also celebrates our own fathers! Pillars, oracles and ‘citadels’ of wisdom! Just like I asked of us on Mothers’ day, are we even aware of what’s going on with dad these days? Aches? Pains? Prostate issues? Whether he still has or even takes his prescribed pills? Do we buy him alcohol for Fathers’ day? (I’ve always been curious where the custom of buying alcohol as a standard and regular gift for fathers came from! Who thought of this ridiculous idea and said,’wow! Great! Henceforth, if you want to say thank you to daddy, do it with a bottle of spirit?)’ Please don’t do that. Let’s celebrate dad and wish him many more years. This can be done by buying daddy a health plan. This ensures that his annual medicals are done, his drug refill sorted out without issues and that any unforeseen medical/health issue is dealt with immediately without waiting for you to save up money for it.

Daddy also feels happy that he is being taken care of…this does wonders for his emotional health not to talk of his physical health. Remember, you will be an aging father sometime soon (time is just racing by, isn’t it? It wasn’t like this a few years back, yeah? 😉

And perhaps, just perhaps, this might end the age-old rivalry between mamas and papas about who gets a better deal whenever events are being celebrated ‘mothers who get clothes, jewelry and trips thrown in’ Or ‘fathers who just get a bottle of gin?!!!!’ 😀

Here’s to a healthier dad and a healthier you!

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The halfway mark.

Posted on June 15, 2013 by chatwithdrketch

It is June already…and halfway down the month! Where did the year run to? It wasn’t so long ago that it was January and I was trying hard to remember to write ’13 at the back of my dates and not ’12. Let’s not forget those New Year resolutions…to be more careful with spending, keep to a budget etc. And the health resolutions? To go to the gym at least 5 days a week, walk 10,000 steps a day, eat healthier and just find ways of getting our exercise in a day…how’s that coming along? Good…or maybe not so good? The half way mark is usually a good time to take stock and check on how well we are doing or not doing. Especially as there are still 6 months to make amends.

As I take stock, my mind runs through all the events that have been significant to me. I remember writing about Angelina Jolie and her decision to have a double mastectomy. It was a decision that I particularly mulled over…wondering how I’d have handled a clearly difficult decision. I recall that a few weeks after that, she indeed lost an aunt to the disease. I don’t know how close they were but I imagine that if money could have held this disease at bay, Angelina would not have batted an eyelid to do the needful. So it appears she did have a reason to panic and go for the mastectomy. It kinda sounds like the biblical injunction to cut off any part of our bodies that causes us to sin or in this case, causes you to die before your time! (Olorun m’aje!) Can you do that? Food for thought 😉

As I mull over all these, I am particularly happy and excited about the gift of life. I am more encouraged to do the right things so I can live to a ripe old age and see my grandchildren and great grandchildren (yep! And I don’t intend to be bent over at this time! Will be looking absolutely gorgeous and fab ;), if you get what I mean!).

In keeping with the cancer discourse, here are five top foods that help you give cancer a big kick in the….you know where 😉

Green leafy vegetables: These are chock full of anti-oxidants that protect the body against various cancers. These include efo tete (green to my Ibo clan), garden egg or egg plant leaves (Efo gba gba in Yoruba and akwukwo anara in Ibo), ugu (melon leaves). Remember to cook the vegetables minimally and in fact, the leaves like the egg plant are absolutely delicious when eaten raw.  My favourite way of cooking the veggies is to put the washed and cut veggies in a pot, add some salt and onions and just cover it for about a minute over low heat. Then I stir and depending on the quantity, another minute or two and it would be steamed and still crunchy and juicy. I use this as a side dish for all my meals when I don’t have a salad. Apart from their anti-cancer properties, these vegetables have copious amounts of folic acid which helps protect an unborn child from neural tube defects…you know those babies born with sacs and soft tissues protruding along the spinal line. So get every pregnant woman you know to load up on this vital food.

Cabbages are known as cruciferous foods and also contain anti-oxidants that fight cancer.  Other foods that are in this group that have the same property are cauliflower and broccoli. These can be found in major supermarkets and if you can’t, good old cabbage, found in our local markets, do the trick too! J

Carrots are rich in cancer-protecting anti-oxidants. Their nutrients are better protected when boiled with their skin on. This also keeps the vegetable, moist and juicy.

Berries are also very rich in anti-oxidants. Strawberries, blackberries and blueberries, all found in major supermarkets as frozen or fresh fruits are cancer-protective.  The star apple fruit (agbalumo) is also thought to have some anti-cancer properties. Some more work is being done to confirm this.

Whole grains are full of fiber and cancer-fighting ingredients. So load up on brown or Ofada/Abakaliki rice, whole wheat bread etc.

Funny, when I was younger, I made my mum start buying polished rice. She was a great fan of Abakaliki rice and I couldn’t get it…what with the stones (in spite of de-stoning, as they called it) and the smell…which I absolutely adore now and hated then :D.  We always had bags and bags of the rice at home. It literally took years to empty our pantry of the stuff. Today, I wish I had that ‘real Mccoy’ here now. Makes me remember the saying that by the time, you’re old enough to know that your mother (or parents) was right, you probably have children who think you are wrong! Talk about generational gap 😀

Here’s to a healthier you!

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The Blame Game

Posted on June 2, 2013 by chatwithdrketch

It was children’s day on the 27th of May. I was at an event to give a talk on good hygiene to the children. In the course of the event, I had cause to use the bathroom. It was absolutely atrocious what I saw there. Children using the bathroom in really terrible ways while their parents watched. 

There were children urinating on the floor! In a bathroom that had modern conveniences! I could not find a toilet that was neat enough to be used…without water on the floor. Disgusting water in which millions and millions of germs were swimming and looking for another home. 

As if that wasn’t bad enough, as soon as they were done with the dirty deed, they all turned and walked right out of the bathroom. No hand washing…infact they were grabbed by the hands and shooed right out of the bathroom. Now this is doubly disgusting! First these children messed a bathroom that (I assume) was perfectly clean when they came in. In the course of that they got some germs on them and on their hands. Now without the hand washing, they were certified to go spread these germs to their friends waiting outside, through holding hands, sharing snacks or even just hugging. 

I was in shock! Please parents, remember that your children’s behaviour, attitude and health lie in your hands. If you don’t teach them how to use the bathroom, how on earth will they learn? If you don’t teach them how to wash their hands, or even how germs get into their bodies, how can they possibly prevent these germs from becoming a problem?

The shock I felt is the same one I feel when I observe people passing dirty places and spitting. My question is, if you found that place disgusting, are you not making it doubly so for people who would pass after you? First they have to deal with the site of your spittle and then confront whatever it was that you saw or smelt in the first instance. Perhaps, this person (person 2) may decide to spit too, for good measure and then we create an unending cycle of filth and disease.

Studies have shown that a significant reduction in the presence of diseases in the world was observed when good sanitation became a way of life. So it wasn’t so much because of the vaccines and anti-biotics, it was mainly due to good hygiene. In fact, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, respiratory infections and diarrheal diseases are known to be the greatest killers of under-5s. The reason is not farfetched, unwashed dirty hands being used to prepare foods, causing diarrhea or unwashed hands being put into mouths by children; people sneezing into their hands and shaking people who in turn inhale these germs…the means of spreading these germs could go on and on. To show how important simple hygienic practices are, it has been shown that in areas where hand washing was introduced, the incidence of diarrheal diseases and respiratory infections reduced by half. Let’s add numbers to this to make it clearer: if there were 20 children out of 100 dying every year from these infections, with the introduction of hand washing, this reduces to 10. From hand washing alone! 

This is so basic, so how come, we still have children who mess up toilets while parents look on in approval? Who is to blame? The Government who hasn’t provided an opportunity for this woman to be educated, so she knows what’s appropriate and what’s not? The lack of  ‘in your face’ health education programs to keep re-inforcing the hygiene message? The parent who should know better…if they have been given the opportunity? The children who go to school and have been taught to wash their hands after using the bathroom (we hope) and yet choose not to practice same? Or perhaps at every point that these lessons ought to have been taught, people looked the other way and felt it wasn’t their problem. That means it’s our collective fault.

We can rectify it today. Teach a child how and when to wash their hands. Teach them to sneeze into the crooks of their elbows and not their hands. Teach them to wash their hands for at least 20 seconds. Teach them to soap their hands properly and teach them to rinse their hands well.

Remember that an ounce of protection is better than a pound of cure…or in popular parlance, prevention is better than cure.

Here’s to a healthier you!

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Pinkie Swear?

Posted on May 24, 2013 by chatwithdrketch

Remember how when we were younger, we would bet on things and to make it more authentic, make it a pinkie swear :D. Those were the days when we didn’t have too many issues to contend with…though it did seem like we had a lot on our plates then! So I smile when my children say, ‘mum, you can’t be more tired than we are; we had to go to school, do tests, then school work, then home work at home and then we still have some chores to do!. The world is certainly not fair’. How do I begin to explain to them that I have to go to work, then do grocery shopping on the way, school run, get dinner ready, supervise their homework, listen to them whine 🙂 and then still do some school work myself?!  Oh, whatever happened to, ‘the higher you go, the cooler it becomes’? Someone clearly sold us a dummy! Anyways, I digress.

 How many of you would swear to do whatever it takes to be healthy, live as many years as possible in perfect health of mind and body? How many would swear to work out everyday knowing that even 30 mins of exercise everyday cuts your risk of a lot of diseases including cancer? How many would reduce their alcohol intake knowing that it reduces their chances of a lot of ailments? We could go on!

It is with these questions in mind that we turn to the disease represented by the colour pink…breast cancer. Angelina Jolie made headlines last week when she announced that she had a high risk of breast cancer and decided to take action to reduce her risk. This involved double mastectomy…which in simple everyday English means cutting off both her breasts!!! A small pause here for all that to sink in….

Note that she didn’t have cancer, a lump, any change in breast size or contour to suggest that something funny was going on. She just had a gene that meant she was more at risk of having breast cancer than other people. So she decided to do something about it. This sounds like common sense and appears to even follow biblical injunctions to cut off any part of your body that causes you to sin, right? It sounds like everybody should know this…’in fact why make a big fuss about it; I’d do the same!’ But here’s the thing, a lot of us prefer to live in denial. We KNOW we have a family history of hypertension, but do we check our blood pressure always…NO. Some of us know we’ve undertaken some risky sex behaviour, do we screen for STIs and HIV…NO. After all, it’s better not to know, right? Wrong.

People, I’m about to utter some earth shattering mind bogging amazing news right now: ignorance is not bliss! In fact it is the not-knowing that constitutes a problem and puts more people at risk. It is for this same reason that breast and other cancers that can be detected pretty early go undetected until the final stages when little or nothing can be done because people do not want to get screened, preferring not to know. This is sad!

There are pre-disposing factors for breast cancer. These factors are things, conditions or situations that affect your chances of getting breast cancer. However having even two of these risk factors does not necessarily mean that you will have cancer; in fact people with no risk factors have been known to have cancer. The point however is that if any of the risk factors are present, then one should be sure to reduce that risk by focusing on preventive strategies discussed here.
  
The risk factors for breast cancer include things that you don’t really have much control over like:
Your sex: women are more likely to have this disease than men.

Your age: the risk of this cancer increases with age.

Race or ethnicity: white women are more pre-disposed to breast cancer, but black people are more likely to die of the complications of breast cancer.

Your genes: about 5 to 10% of breast cancer cases are thought to be hereditary resulting from inherited defective genes. These cancers are found in even young women where they may affect both breasts.

Family history of breast cancer: if a member of your family has suffered from this disease, you have a higher risk of it.

Personal history of breast cancer: the risk of this disease increases if one has had this disease in the past. 

Women who have had a lot of menstrual cycles because their menstrual cycles started early and stopped later in life, around 55 years.

Previous radiation therapy to the chest also increases risk.

Other associations that have been made with breast cancer and increase the risk of having the disease include:

  • Women who have had no children or had their first child after the age of 30 years.
  • Women using oral contraceptive pills
  • Breast feeding has been found to be protective of breast cancer. So ladies, kindly breast feed those little ones.
  • The use of alcohol has been very clearly linked to an increased risk of breast cancer. Follow the daily limits that we have advised on previous posts. 
  • Being overweight or obese after menopause increases the risk
  • Lack of physical activity has also been incriminated. 

So, do you give your word today to do something about these risk factors if they are under your control, pinkie swear? Or are you going to keep hiding your head in the sand? It doesn’t mean danger is not lurking round the corner, it just means you don’t know when it hits you over the head with a big bang.

Do a self breast exam every day…it’s not too much. There are multiple online materials that teach you exactly how to do this. If you feel a lump, nodule, swelling…anything you’re uncomfortable about, see your doctor. Better safe than sorry. Look at yourself in the mirror, naked. You know what your breasts normally look like; if they change shape, colour, contour or your nipples start to look different or give strange discharges, see a doctor…today and not tomorrow. Once you hit 40, get a mammogram done once every two years (some authorities say from age 50. Ask your doctor what works for you based on your risk profile). And if you can afford it, get gene tested for breast cancer. You just might be buying more time and improving the quality of that time you have to spend with a family that loves you to bits.

Be healthy, people!

Here’s to a healthier you!

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