The media fraternity has once again lost one of its greats to the Covid-19 scourge. Lorna Irungu, a former media personality and communications heavyweight succumbed to the disease yesterday.
She had just mourned another media personality, Robin Njogu who also succumbed to Covid-19 last week.
“This is heartbreaking. We worked together at Nation and he was always such a stand-up guy. Always ready to help out. RIP my friend,” she wrote a few days ago.
Irungu had a well-documented struggle with lupus, an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks healthy tissue.
Irungu, who was once a KTN producer, was diagnosed with the disease while in her early twenties. The disease attacked her kidneys. Kidney disease has been noted as a risk factor for worse Covid-19 outcomes.
She had kidney failure in 1997, then had her first kidney transplant in 1998. She ended up having three kidney transplants within 15 years, the last one being in 2008.
“My first transplant was donated by my father, my second by my sister, my third by my brother. They have been there for me and literally have given (me) back my life,” she said in a Ted Talk.
Her friends set up an organisation called Friends of Lorna to fundraise money for her sky high medical bills for her transplants and medications.
When she got her first transplant, she went back to television for a while but then left and then threw herself into the world of communications, eventually becoming Managing Director of the Gina Din group before her death.
Irungu had always been very open about her struggle with lupus, but in an interview, she said that came with people associating her with the disease and she would sometimes get questions such as whether she would be able to handle the workload. The experience sometimes came with stigma, judgement and affected career opportunities, which she said made her understand why people hid illnesses instead of being as open about it as she was.
“When you have a chronic illness, people look at you and the first thing they see is illness. They define you by what they know. Refuse to be that.” she said.
In a Ted talk, Lorna spoke about the life lessons she had learned in the course of her struggle with lupus and kidney failure, first was which was that information was the key to helping her and anyone else have control in such situations.
“When I was first diagnosed with lupus in 1997, there was no lupus specialist in the region. When my kidneys started failing due to lupus, I was confused. I needed to know what was happening,” she said. Through my contacts of friends and family who were abroad, I got in touch with the Lupus Foundation of America and one kind doctor photocopied a book and mailed it to me. It was titled, ‘Lupus and kidney Failure.’”And that book saved my life.
The book empowered her with knowledge on medicines she would and would take and the courses of treatment best suited for her, alongside discussions with her doctors. Armed with information, she was able to use groundbreaking treatments in stem cell research, which were not in use globally then, when she went for her second transplant in India.
She was married to Edwin Macharia, who has a background in Public Health and is the Global Managing Partner, at Dalberg Advisors. They have a 12-year-old daughter. He posted a lone heartbreak emoji on Twitter, with an earlier tweet saying, “Today was not a good day.”
From hosting Club Kiboko TV entertainment show to becoming the Gina Din Group Managing Director, Lorna Irungu-Macharia will be remembered as one of Kenya’s media personality whose life came full circle.
The former KTN presenter and News producer who is also remembered for hosting the Omo-Pick-A-Box show back in the 90s stands out as a resilient fighter who publicly shared her long battle with kidney failure.
During a recent interview with Nation’s NTV, Irungu opened up on how she dreamed of becoming Kenya’s Christiane Amanpour, a wish that was cut short by heartbreaking circumstances that followed her TV debut.
“I always wanted to be on TV as a News presenter as I was a bit of the serious child. However, I first got into stage acting as I did like theater and that is how Jimmy Gathu discovered me,” Irungu said during the interview.
Asked why she never ascended to TV News hosting, reluctantly, she alluded that she had already been accorded an entertainment journalist tag and thus wasn’t seen to carry the image of a News anchor.
Unknown to many, Irungu was one of the pioneer actresses at Phoenix Players where she starred in a number of plays among them Fire Razes by Max Frasche, Out of Order by Ray Cooney and Comedy of Errors by William. Shakespeare.
A fast-rising acting star, she had gone ahead to win a Sh200,000 scholarship by the Kenya Wines Agencies at the youthful age of 22 to become one of the most promising thespians in the country.
Her love for acting had started at an early age after joining drama club while at Moi Nairobi Girls secondary school before joining Daystar University – where she studied Journalism.
She recalled how in 1989, how as a form two student she got involved in drama plays, dance and verse before getting her big break in 1991 after, together with four other girls, scripted the play Torn Between that won awards during the secondary school drama festivals finals in Mombasa.
During her last interview with NTV late last year, the 1973-born said after Jimmy Gathu invited her to try a TV hosting job, she was heartbroken after getting the news that she had failed, that to mean she would not get the job.
“Jimmy Gathu did a demand and asked that I do another screen test with me and him co-hosting. The recording ended running on TV and that is how I ended up getting the TV job,” she told the host.
And so dear was she to her that when The Standard called him yesterday for a comment, he was lost in grief.
“I will…gimme time to get my thoughts together…I’m shattered by her death,” he said.
Lorna has been a focused media personality who always followed her vision and believed she would see her dreams come true.
Most remembered for hosting the Club Kiboko show on KTN alongside Jimmy Gathu between 1994 and 1999, that after becoming a household name due to her popularity as a presenter of another TV show Omo-Pick-a-Box, Lorna became one of the pioneer entertainment TV presenter. At the time, she was also producing two other shows, Maisha and Niaje.
In a number of interviews, Lorna spoke candidly of how she was stignatised after speaking out openly about the kidney failure ailment.
At some point she hinted that people no longer saw her as the media personality they had known but rather ‘as a disease’.
“I became a single story and people decided to see me as a disease. People would ask if I would cope with the (media) workload and that made me know why people never come out to speak about their difficulties,” she said during an interview.
Credit: Source link