Ibrahim Alfa Jr had been feeling unwell for a while – he’d been coughing up blood – but he says he only realised how ill he was when the facial recognition on his phone stopped working, because it could no longer recognise his face. When he went to visit his sister in 2022, she was so shocked by his appearance, she took him straight to A&E. He was suffering from anaphylaxis, a severe and potentially fatal allergic reaction: moreover, he had a pulmonary embolism that was causing his lung to fill up with blood. “I thought: oh my God, that’s literally what killed Andy Weatherall,” he says today. Like Weatherall once was, Alfa Jr is a veteran star of British rave culture. “So, like, wow.”
The embolism treated, he was sent home, but still wasn’t feeling right. The weekend after, a second pulmonary embolism was found on his other lung. The weekend after that, he had a heart attack. Then he had a second heart attack. Returning home, he discovered he’d become “allergic to everything. Even water was swelling my face,” he says. “You just don’t know what you can eat, so I just lived on porridge and lettuce leaves for three months, and didn’t see anybody. I just locked myself in a room, and a friend would bring me porridge and lettuce leaves. I only went out to go to the doctors. Any type of social life, of seeing other humans just disappeared. It was that visceral.”
