« on: September 18, 2007, 01:48:39 PM »
I felt the first symptoms while hiking home from a distant village in our parish of Kamabai, in Sierra Leone – a country made famous in the recent film of Leonardo di Caprio, Blood Diamond. A squeezing pain gripped my chest. I stopped walking, bent down grimacing, thoughts of a possible heart-related problem racing through my head.
The last three miles to Kagbosona village had to be by foot. You followed a narrow path and crossed several streams, a couple actually by just skirting along the banks and then over well-placed stones, and another pair over bridges of vine-bound tree trunks that swayed precariously with your every movement. Halfway before reaching the village I was already sorry I told Fr. Edgar not to fetch me at Kamagbengbeh in the afternoon.
The encounter with the people made me forget the tiring trip. They danced and clapped, led by catechist Henry, to the rhythm of his compositions, which were veritable catechetical lessons. (Africa is the birthplace of rap and hiphop, and here I was hearing the raw, and perhaps purer, version!). The meal, which consisted of rice, groundnut (as they call peanut) soup with fowl washed down well with poyo, or palm wine.
Three months later, having come home to the Philippines as delegate of the missions in the provincial chapter of Augustinian Recollects, I had the opportunity for a thorough checkup. In Sierra Leone, the medical facilities are so rudimentary that I couldn’t even have a complete chest x-ray to look into the cause of my chest pains, let alone undergo an electrocardiogram. The Spanish doctor at the hospital of the Saint John of God brothers in Lunsar town was apologetic that their x-ray films were only half-size; he then half-joked that since the result of my upper chest was ok, we could assume that the abdomen part was ok, too. Getting more serious now, he said that when the health issue involved the heart or the head, one has to get treatment abroad.
My first checkup in Manila showed assuring results. But the angina did not go away. Paying closer attention to my description of the symptoms, my Bacolod doctor decided to take another ECG. Seeing the results, she advised me to go back immediately to Manila to have my angiogram taken.
Though the presence of chest pains prepared me for the eventuality, I couldn’t believe when the angiogram showed that I had cardiovascular disease. Perhaps this is a normal human reaction: diseases like these happened to other people, not to me. Wasn’t I regularly exercising? And I did not smoke nor was I overweight and I was, and am, still relatively young. True, I have hypertension, and well, my father and a sister and a brother had health problems connected with the heart; and perhaps I was not too careful with my diet (oh, those Italian cheeses during my six-year Roman sojourn and the frequent mayonnaise spread to improve the taste of staple Kamabai cassava!), confident that regular exercise burned extra calories and extra fat away, but all in all I couldn’t imagine myself a cardiovascular patient.
Perhaps the same dynamic that made me initially deny the reality of my having the disease also made me deny that I was a candidate for the procedure I was advised to undergo. The procedure depended on which interventionist doctor I approached. I went to four doctors before settling for a fifth. Doctor number one, who performed the angiogram, said that I should undergo angioplasty. Doctor number two said that my case being a multivessel case, angioplasty was not indicated, bypass was the only solution. Doctor number three and four were for angioplasty and bypass, respectively. The score was tied at two.
I do not bring this out in order to pit one side against the other nor should this be considered a lack of respect for the doctors, who for their part are esteemed names, but simply to point out two things. First is that, unless the procedure in a doctor’s field of specialization is clearly uncalled for, it seems that the doctor will advise the procedure he has specialized in. Which is a very natural thing to do. The second is that as a patient, I felt the need to participate actively in the discernment about the procedure I would have to undergo.
It is a boon these days, at least to patients, that their participation is made more possible with the availability of medical literature through popular books and the Internet. A web search gave me access to articles and books, which I promptly downloaded or asked from friends abroad. One book touted nitric oxide as the cardiovascular cure; another assured the effects of the omega three diet; a third sang the praises of the virgin coconut oil, and a fourth urged me to be a smart patient, effectively helping the doctor whose role must be that of a detective who reads the clues so as to be able to determine the disease with exactitude and cure it successfully. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, we are warned. And so I must have appeared to my patient doctors; my little knowledge made me brash and aggressively wanting to “participate in the debate” about my case.
Finally, I found a doctor “after my own heart”, who was willing to have me undergo medical management. Looking back, I now realize that that must have been part of his pedagogy. He was not merely applying again to me what he specialized in, in the same way that the angioplastists advised angioplasty and the surgeons bypass. He saw that I was not ready for intervention, and so he kept me on medicines and, suspecting stress induced by my finicky disposition, he spaced my visits to his clinic so as to make me more calm and confident. In the mind of my other doctors, postponing intervention was pushing my luck too far. I was supposed to be a walking time bomb.
With medicine, diet, regular exercise and prayer, I set out to prove that I did not need intervention. I even tried alternative medicines, without my doctor’s knowledge and much less approval. Special diets and alternative therapies were now on my menu. I was very much attracted to the success stories of those who tried herbals.
Moreover, people assured me that I was in their prayer list. With so many people praying for you, you thought that maybe God would dispense with his usual way of healing through his human instruments and make a direct and miraculous cure himself.
At the end of last year, after several months of special regimen, I was not feeling better. In January, before a year had passed since the first angiogram, my doctor agreed to have me undergo another endoscopy. The results showed no improvement over the last year.
There was no more reason to wait. I saw for myself what the doctors had said all along: I needed an intervention. My heart was indeed a pump and my arteries the piping; the pump was ok but the piping was clogged. True, the patient is a whole person with a body and soul, emotions and beliefs, and not only a mass of tissues to repair when gone wrong, but the extent of clogging in my arteries was such that medicines, diet and exercise could not reverse it, and God, in his infinite wisdom, knew that a supernatural miracle was not needed in my case.
There was a miracle alright, but it was of another kind. Text messages of support and prayer, even from people I have not heard of in thirty years, came pouring in before and after the operation. A day after my operation on 25 January, I was strong enough to text assurances to close friends and relatives that the surgery had been a success.
Earlier, I had prayed that I would be spared having to undergo surgery. I prayed that God would make an exception for me. In the meantime, the months of special regimen prepared me mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually for the eventual surgery. I underwent the knife at the moment that I was most prepared.
It is not that my prayer was not heard. It is that God granted me what was best for me. Had God granted me the miracle, I would have received messages of congratulations for being singled out instead of the outpouring of love and support that came from friends and relatives and even from people I did not know. Perhaps a miracle would have made me vain, whereas with the way it turned out, I am humbled and, more importantly, I am thankful for my many blessings. Sickness allows me to relate better with suffering people because I know whereof I speak. Even from my hospital bed, as people texted me about their own sicknesses and sufferings, I could empathize with them, assure them of my prayers and give them my priestly blessings.
On the same day I came home from the hospital on February 3, Fr. Manuel Lipardo, one of the Filipino Recollects in Sierra Leone texted me: Welcome 2 ur second life. Do u hav a 2nd thought on SL?
I texted back: Am praying dat I wil be deemed worthy 2 be sent there. Certainly I want to work there.
Not that I don’t want to work in San Sebastian. I am happy with the work here and the persons I am with. But it is about something else.
