No One Just ‘Slumps’ and Dies! And No It’s Not From Your Village!

When I was growing up I read a lot of newspapers. They were everywhere in my house. My dad had a ‘vendor’ who walked around the estate every day. This dude had a shiny forehead adorned with sweat bullets. His left arm was loaded with a bunch of daily newspapers and periodicals. His right hand held a duck call horn that he would toot to let the neighborhood know he had arrived.

 

Punch, Guardian, ThisDay, Vanguard…

Sun, PM News, Tribune…

City People, Encomium, Fame…

 

Every so often, there’d be headline stories about people who died of mysterious causes:

‘Chief Ayo Adamu Achikwe Slumps And Dies During 70th Birthday Celebration’

‘Man Slumps While Jogging In Lagos’

‘Abacha Eats Prostitute’s Poisoned Pear, Slumps And Dies’

‘Man Slumps During Sex And Dies’

 

You get my drift….

 

I would read on to see what the cause of death was and there’d be no more explanation. Okay, then.

My dad died thirteen years ago. The vendor doesn’t come around anymore and I haven’t seen a print copy of The Punch in ten years. Instead, I go online to the webpages of these media giants to get my daily news fix. Sometimes I even go to younger sites like Bellanaija and her counterparts. Nothing has changed, my brothers and sisters. People are still ‘slumping’ and dying.

Dafuq??????

What does the word slump even mean? Dude, I had to look this thing up to make sure I wasn’t crazy. Of course, I looked in a dictionary online. Don’t have a paper one. Go figure.

Here’s what I found:

Slump: /sləmp/

Verb: slump; 3rd person present: slumps; past tense: slumped; past participle: slumped; gerund or present participle: slumping

1. 
Sit, lean, or fall heavily and limply, especially with a bent back. “She slumped against the cushions”

I’m sitting there thinking to myself: There’s nothing causing them to ‘slump’?

When they arrive at the hospital and the coroner performs a post-mortem exam does she list the cause of death as ‘slumping’?

So why then do journalists report stories about deaths using this ambiguous term ‘slump’ that means absolutely nothing?!?!

Any medical examiner worth her salt knows that there’s always a precise reason why people die. ‘Slump’ means nothing. Even “cardiac arrest” means nothing. No one dies from a cardiac arrest. The cardiac arrest is the thing that happens after whatever initiated the dying process completes its course. People arrest because they’ve been shot by police robbers and have lost so much blood that there’s no volume for the heart to pump to the rest of the body. Or because they ate so much shaki in Whitehouse, their arteries clogged and their heart muscle didn’t get enough oxygen for it to actually pump. Or they had so much cocaine at that house party in Banana last night, their arteries vasoconstricted and stopped delivering blood to their hearts. Or they were born with a conduction abnormality that screwed up their heart rhythm. You get my point, no need to go into a cardiology lesson here.

I asked one of my friends and he said he thinks the reason reporters use the term ‘slump’ is because they don’t know the reason why the person died and since he/she wasn’t sick before, it must have been due to some spiritual causes.

Jaw drop… No comments…

I know superstition is one of the national treasures that we Nigerians hold dear to our hearts but please, brethren, can we let “spiritual causes” be a diagnosis of exclusion when we start to itemize possible causes of death?

Your step-grandmother in the village is not your enemy (or maybe she is, who knows :/N). There are a thousand and one ways to die. No, seriously. There really are. And if you never know what your state of health is, you may actually die from a cause that could have been easily averted.

And then things run in families too. Chances are that whatever medical conditions you have that predispose you to death also run in your family (brings us back to the point that the old lady in the village probably isn’t really a witch). If I have diabetes, my parents, siblings or kids probably have it too.

So if I die and some dimwit reporter writes: ‘ Superhot Bombshell Writer Slumps And Dies’, how does that help anyone in my neighborhood change their lives so they don’t go the same route? Instead, it feeds the exaggerated rhetoric of mysterious deaths caused by bad belle people in the village and hating friends who want to steal your husband.

If people keep reading that the only way to die is to ‘slump’ then there’s no message that we should take care of our bodies and mitigate preventable causes of death like hypertension, obesity, coronary artery disease and diabetes.

Instead, we go from one scam artist prophet to the next looking for how to prayerfully annihilate household enemies that don’t even send us. The enemy is within, my people. Sometimes we are our own downfall. Not every death has to be mysterious. If you know what you’re working with, death can sometimes be prevented.

Go to a reputable primary care physician and get examined today so you can figure out what changes you need to make to live a long and healthy life. Eat good food. Be physically active every chance you get. And hope and pray for the best. The next time you read a newspaper and a joker journalist who didn’t do his homework publishes a story about somebody who slumped and died, your inner skeptic should alarm you to the fact that this is likely a lie. Because no one, literally, no one just slumps and dies.

 

And your step-grandmother probably doesn’t even think about you.

 

Ayo ati Alaafia ✌