My friend Kate sent me this video by Christiaan van Vuuren (The Fully Sick Rapper), a friend of hers who, has spent the past 104 days in quarantine. He has Multi-Drug Resistant TB and has to be isolated, and treated with a cocktail of antibiotics. He was an outdoor advertising sales rep and was rushed to hospital on December 9 after continuously coughing up blood during a work meeting.”I thought, I’ve seen this in the movies before and it’s only when someone’s taken a bullet in the stomach or an arrow in the back or something,” he told a journo recently.
After detecting a hole in his right lung the size of a 50-cent piece, doctors identified the disease as tuberculosis, suspecting he contracted it during his travels to South Africa or South America.
He was meant to be out after 7 days. But things went wrong. Now, he doesn’t really know when he’ll finally be released. He spends his time making kooky rap videos.
The idea of being trapped and isolated fascinates me. To be completely clipped of your power and freedom…how’d I cope? Especially when there’s no end date.
I emailed Christiann in hospital and asked him three questions. His answers are long and considered and I really love the way he explains how the experience has been part of a shift he needed to make to the next phase of his life…
1. Do you feel this happened for a reason?
It’s interesting… I wouldn’t exactly say that I feel this has happened for a reason, but I definitely think that a lot of positive things have come from this situation, which I first looked at as being a very negative one. Yeah, I would say that it makes sense to me that this has has happened, and even go as far as to say that perhaps something like this needed to happen to me to help me grow up a bit. That may sound weird, because in all of my videos I carry on like an absolute child, but please allow me to explain…
