Dale Carnegie said, “The expression one wears on one’s face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one’s back.” A smile is the best expression on a human’s face. A smile lights up and brightens the face like a candle in the dark. The faces becomes bright and beautiful. The greatest enemy of a smile is pain. It suddenly turns off the light and like NEPA (of the old) plunges the face into darkness.
The face becomes contorted and ugly. Emotional pain, especially watching people suffering or in severe physical pain, is an unpleasant feeling, psychological in nature and often overpowering.
Edwin S. Shneidman, a pioneer in the field of sociology, described it as, “how much you hurt as a human being.” A feeling of helplessness worsens pain! It is simply mental torment!
Just imagine that many medical doctors have to go through feeling this way nearly every day like the trauma we have all been going through for the past 50 years, on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway!
About 30 years ago I slept on that road; 10 years ago, I took a friend to the Lagos Airport, he landed in London two clear hours before I arrived in Ibadan. Yet, I didn’t stop anywhere!
Mind you, we didn’t have any bad weather, fog or any of the terrible driving conditions which usually mitigate against safe driving in many developed countries of the world! If you are above forty years of age, you stand an 80 per cent chance of knowing someone who had lost his life on that road!
The smile is gradually disappearing from my face on account of pain. To ease the pain, I asked for APC only to be told that it was no longer in the market. APC was one of the best, non-narcotic pain killers in its days! “Where have you been all these years?” my nurse retorted. “May I have some PCM instead?” I asked again.
“There are too many fake brands of PCM and we don’t know the genuine ones anymore. APC, I am told, has been rebranded as PCM!” she added. “But that’s impossible! Don’t we controlling agencies any more? I asked obviously confused.
Now my head was literarily on fire. The headache was intense. Who will cure my headache? Who will relieve me from this impulsive pain, ripping me apart like the butcher’s knife? The natural smile, which adorns my ever cheerful face is gradually fading away.
There is tremendous power in a smile. A smile can dissolve hostility, impact confidence, convey a feeling of happiness, hope and positivity, influence and change things. A smile returned, can also have immense influence on the ‘giver.’ Yes it can!
The most memorable day in my life, as a medical doctor, was when an old woman gave me the best smile I ever received in my life. She was deaf and dumb and had a blinding cataract in one eye.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, she lost her vision in her only seeing eye from an attack of acute angle-closure glaucoma. With none of her children around, the house help looking after her was helpless and it took more than two weeks before the correct help came.
Restive, struggling and totally uncooperative because her only connection with the outside world had been severed by blindness. She probably thought she was in hell and waiting for the fire to start burning!
It was a herculean task bundling her to the hospital and she had to be physically restrained with her arms and legs tied to the bed. The only seeing eye had by now become irreversibly blind. Her only hope was to restore sight to the cataract blind eye. This was promptly done under general anaesthesia.
As the dressings were removed from her operated eye the following day, her contorted face softened up, became bright and the “darkness” was literally and immediately replaced by the light from a thousand candles – a big smile. Her smile was a sign of appreciation and gratitude. It was best gift I ever received!
In the last two months, so many things have happened in our country. The smile is gradually disappearing from the face of all of us. When I hear about the billions of naira spent by politicians seeking elective offices and consider, side by side, the pervasive poverty around us, people dying of hunger, people being hacked to death because of their faith or ethnicity, children and adults dying owing to poor medical attention, the number of people going blind from lack of appropriate medications for their eye problems, thousands of people with blinding cataract whose sight could be restored by simple cataract surgery, I shudder at how easy it is to restore the fading smile on my face and to cure my headache.
When you smile remember the less privileged around. Put smile on faces of the hungry, the dying who can be rescued from the grips of death, the thousands of cataract blind who can have their sight restored – the good you can do with some of the money, God has given you.
Take a few seconds and shut your eyes. Count one to hundred and momentarily feel the crippling effect of blindness. Now open your eyes and SMILE. Do you feel a mood change? Do you feel good and great?
Anytime you are having a hard day or a bad time just pause and smile for a few seconds. It will make a difference to your life and to the life of many others around you. Share a smile with someone today. Light a candle! Help someone one to regain his sight. The reward? You will be rewarded with an appellation – ‘AS” An Apostle of Smile!
and then