Thy Father's Son

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.