I am my childhood and my childhood is me.
Thus talking about my childhood, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the lessons for myself and others(individuals, family, community, and organizations, Nigeria, Africa, and the world at large) is my life and a lifetime journey.

So, yesterday, Sunday, January 24, 2021, I couldn’t come your way as usual with #THESTORIESOFMYCHILDHOOD. I have not gotten along well with my health most recently and only the Lord has been my strength and my family and those around me watching over me to make sure I abide by the strict instructions of my doctors.

Everything began for me from childhood(smile): my health and disposition to the same. My upbringing bequeathed to me a curative disposition to health matters and not preventive, which is prevalent today. For example, we hardly completed medical prescriptions. We stopped not because we completed the dosage of the medication dispensed to us when we visited the hospital when we were ill, but because we felt better than we were when we visited the hospital.

So you would find around our home half of this syrup, almost empty of that syrup, all manners of tablets and capsules, which inscribed prescriptions had disappeared.

The foregoing was my initiation to self-medication. Once I felt the symptoms I have felt before, it was my custom to quickly dash for some of the leftover medication flying around in the house. It is a major concern that this habit is still with me to date and I have been giving it a fight of a lifetime that I may correct or at least regulate the same. I have bags of unfinished medications from season to season. You see me checking expiry dates and befriending Google to be reminded of the symptoms a particular residential medication in one of my bags is best at curing.

Another thing about my childhood and health is that I learned to hide my pain, particularly when I suffered a physical injury because exposing the same may incur the wrath of my handlers. So little bruises festered in hiding and became majors scars, which I carry particularly on my legs till today.

Neighbors, old women volunteered to wash and treat my wounds, using local concoctions as a negotiated intervention to save me from the wrath of my dad when my hidden wounds became exposed.

I was that child, who was in and out of the hospital regularly. I brazed up for the pain of receiving an injection well before I was 10.

Today, I tried to shed tons of health practices, which are not in the best interest of my aging physiological make up and which young people around me must not imbibe in their best interest.

Please take it from me that childhood is everything. Our precious children are either beneficiaries or victims of our examples. So the question is, what examples are we showing now that are either setting up our precious children for present and future glory or shame? 

Do have an INSPIRED week.