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| My youngest sister Maymay attending to Tatay after we transferred him to to the HRU .. |
Ooops!
I go beyond the hospital drop off point, I suppose to get off immediately in
front of the hospital along the national high way but I fall asleep due to
fatigue. I have to hurriedly get a tricycle to bring me back to the hospital clutching
the medicines that I have to source outside the hospital pharmacy and travelled
to another city just to get these tiny
but prize medicines that my Tatay needs. Tomorrow will be a month that
change our lives as siblings, for me personally and being back in town that I
left and visited only a few times that
includes my younger brother and my
Nanay (mother) funerals since I was sixteen years old, though the landscape did
not change but a lot of things I have to rediscover, almost everything is
strange including the societal dynamics.
After nine beautiful years of serving as an
international volunteer where I love and like my work so much helping others, I
realized if I do things for others why I cannot do it to the man that I love so
much, my father. As I stroked his
graying hairs, I admired his beautiful age lines, age lines that tells many
stories of failures, lessons learned and successes, like the work that I did in
the development work that span that more than the timeline of my career work
that I spend in the mainstream world.
There my man, the cowboy that
I admired, my hero, laying in the hospital bed helpless, hooked in the tubes
that aid his breathing and reviving him to life, the very tubes that witness to
my regrets and angst when I am alone with him.
A lifelong lesson keeps on demonizing that time is precious, and
presence and quality time is more that gold, that family is the only thing that
you have that some people are too selfish to demand that you have to give them
time only when they do not know that other people who needs your attention too
and that money counts up to the last centavo.
There are things that we
cannot believe that we cannot do but actually we will amaze that we can do it. I
cannot believe that I had piggy back him personally passing through the slippery
rice paddies that for years never tried to set foot for almost two kilometers
to reaching the rescue car considering that I am just allowed to carry not more
ten kilograms due to my medical conditions and the confidence to approach friends
to help us through the financial obligations to meet meteoric hospital bills
that keeps going, but money is not that significant to me anymore, I just
wanted to have him.
For weeks he is in the ICU,
now in the HRU where I have to do
basically all the health care regiments with the aid of the allied and medical
practitioners, where my desire to be a medical doctor was ignited back, every
moments counts, making sure that contaminations
will be controlled, everything must be sterilized and the doses of
antibiotics will be shots in exact timelines, making sure that trach care is administered rightly, watching
all the vital signs using the monitoring
and the making sure the devices are well
in place, a little error is fatal. He has aneurysm due to the bursting of his
blood vessel on the right side of his brain that left his left side of the body
paralyze.
Sometimes I am upset, I want
everything to be precise and on time, and maintain the highest quality control,
it brings me back how I take care of those little, tiny creatures in tissue
culture lab, now I am dealing with the life of my own father. Sometimes, I
cannot help to be upset and intolerant because of physical fatigue, and then I
realized how patience my tatay and nanay when I was a baby, so helpless and so
dependent on them when I throw my childish tantrums. If I manage to be tolerant
and patience with people who are totally strangers to me why I can’t do it to
the man who gives me flesh and blood and complete my being.
Two more days, we will be a month
now in our new home address, the hospital. I am hoping things will be normalize,
but what is normal to a bionic man? I am facing with plenty of challenges, my Tatay
will be discharge soon when I signed the waiver to bring him home to
continue his medical and comfort
care there, are we going to finish
renovating his room on time into a home
ICU, can I provide him the other machines that we need to prepare before they
will allow us to get out, do I still have the resources when almost the insurances are drain and still
working on our loan applications to take
ages to process to sustain his medical needs, how I am going to deals with the
hospital billings that is more than my
life saving as a volunteer in the last nine years? And how to deal with
the dilemma that if they will not release us, our bills continue to inflate? Ah, I am hopeful that the universe will align
and how about dealing those people who are bitter telling us that is a bad karma? No, I do not have time and I am
not hurt with them, it is actually a good karma, getting rid of those people
that makes our lives bitter and uncomfortable. One thing that I treasured and appreciate,
I am blessed to have siblings to lean on, few family and trusted friends who
bears with me the pain and give us understanding, the joy and the realizations
on how to celebrate the beauty of life and to them I am forever grateful and I
am super grateful to the Supreme Being who allow me to experience this things,
I believe that something more beautiful will happen soon and more blessings to
come. I remain forever grateful to your
understanding and trust; we will cross the bridge when we get there.
