Ex-Nigeria’s international football icon Kanu Nwankwo, has revealed that his wife, Amara saved his life and then nursed him back to good health.
Papilo as he was fondly called first had an open-heart surgery in 1996 after a routine medical examination which revealed a heart valve defect finally opened up in a new book on healthy living on how his wife, Amara Kanu, once made a life-saving discovery that has probably kept him alive until today.
Amara Kanu in her new book healthy living recalled the day she noticed that his heartbeat was not regular and how she nursed him back to health after his second heart surgery in the US.
Amara said in the book that “His heartbeat sounded much louder than normal. I was listening to his chest and it sounded odd. It was the same faulty valve. It was like a ticking time bomb. It’s just one of those things we were lucky to find out. Our youngest was just three at the time. It was very hard. We broke it to them little by little. I said, ‘Daddy will be OK. He’s in good hands’. If I didn’t have positive thinking my life would have been in tatters. From lying down to sitting was a big deal. He had to learn to walk again,”
Amara further wrote “the children would be face-timing me, asking: ‘How is Daddy?’. I remember one time, he was wearing a hospital gown and the youngest said: “Daddy, why are you in nightwear? What’s wrong? You are normally always in sportswear’.”
After six weeks in the hospital, Kanu was strong enough to be flown back to the UK. “The children were waiting for us when we got back. They wanted to jump on me but they had to take it easy”
Kanu was discovered to be having serious heart defect after his heroic outing at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta which according to the former Arsenal player the wife was able to manage successfully through healthy eating, exercise and listening to his body which was led to the establishment of the Kanu Heart Foundation, an organisation which helps predominantly young African children who suffer heart defects and whose work was expanded to provide aid for homeless children in 2008.
