The Return of the Naytib: My Life in 200-plus Short-Short Chapters / by Dr Godofredo U. Stuart> </HEAD> <BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff"> <table width="202" height="25" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td><div align="center"><font face="Arial"><strong><font color="#000000"><a href="index.html"><img src="../Graphics/SXRoundLogo.jpg" width="51" height="48"><font color="#FF0000"><br> <font size="-1">HOME</font></font></a><font color="#0000FF" size="-1"> </font></font></strong></font></div></td> </tr> </table> <div align="center"><font face="Arial"><B><IMG SRC="Salmagundi.jpg" WIDTH="191" HEIGHT="41" ALIGN="BOTTOM" BORDER="0" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3"><u><font size="+7"><br> </font></u></B><font size="+7"><u>The Return Of The Naytib </u></font><u><font color="#999999" size="+2"><br> </font><font color="#0000FF">A Life in 200-plus Short-Short and Short Chapters</font><font color="#0000FF"></font><font color="#000000" size="-1"><br> Work in Progress<br> <br> </font></u></font></div> <table width="780" border="1" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td width="423"><font face="Arial">Early years • 1—12</font></td> <td width="351"><font face="Arial">Autumnland • 93</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Early Abandonment • 7,8</font></td> <td width="351"><font face="Arial">Iris • 98</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Black For A Day • 11</font></td> <td width="351"><font face="Arial">Life in the City • 100</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Archer Days •12—34</font></td> <td width="351"><font face="Arial"> People Power Revolution • 101</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">The Trouble With Art • 14, 15, 16</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">Citizenship • 122-123</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Mortal Sin and Venial Sin • 17-23</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">A Small Flag Incident • 124</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Early Testosterone • 23 - 28</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">Death and Cremation • 126-130</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">College Days • 29—45</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">Medicine in the Inner City • 131-135</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Post-Thomasian • 46—48</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">AIDS • 136-143</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Early America • 49—51</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">Cross Country</font> <font face="Arial">• 147-149</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Internship • 52—53</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">Morocco: A Travel Story • 150-151</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Residency • 54—61</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">Pulang Lupa • 154-159</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Occasional Deaths • 61</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">Deaths in the Family • 163-169</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Prison Stint • 74-77</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">Medicine in the Barrios • 171-175</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Start of Private Practice • 74-77</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">Caretaker's Deaths • 176, 178</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">Business of Medicine</font></td> <td><font face="Arial">Return of the Naytib • 179</font></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial">A Premonition of Death • 92</font></td> <td> </td> </tr> </table> <blockquote> <div align="left"></div> </blockquote> <tr> <td><blockquote> <blockquote> <blockquote> <blockquote> <blockquote> <p align="left"><font size="+7" face="Arial">1</font><font face="Arial"><br> I was born from a failed rhythm method,<br> at a time when the only other alternatives were abstinence and coitus interruptus. <br> Much later, my mother confessed: <strong>You were a mistake</strong>.<br> I was much older then, my ego and ID already developed,<br> able to bear the trauma and implications of such a revelation.<br> Still, it was a burden. I came, unwanted, a mistake.<br> Was it a mathematical error or a calendar mismark?<br> An egg that ovulated too early or too late?<br> Or a hyperactive spermatozoa that survived longer than expected<br> that screwed up the math of rhythm?<br> Well, I'm pretty cool with it.<br> The frenetic spermatozoon that won the race to the egg became moi.<br> Another race, another cycle would have produced someone<br> with a wholly different genetic blueprint and an entirely different temperament.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">2</font><font face="Arial"><br> I was the third of seven children. <br> All the siblings' first names reflected the somewhat Spanish-rooted<br> and provincially gentrified lineage on my mother side,<br> the given names stretched out with bourgeoise embellishments<br> of saintly trimmings or Virgin Mary-ness,<br> thankfully balanced by nicknames extracted from American comic book characters.<br> Jose Arturo, <em>Sluggo</em>, later sensibly dropped, changed to <em>Arthur</em>.<br> Maria Theres Eloisa, <em>Nancy</em>.<br> Antonio Raoul, <em>Rollie</em>.<br> Maria Lourdes Angela, <em>Angie</em>.<br> Maria Concepcion, <em>Baby</em>, later changed to <em>Babes</em>.<br> Luis Eduardo, <em>Boy</em>, later dropped, changed to <em>Louie</em>.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">3</font><font face="Arial"><br> Moi? After my father, Godofredo. Ergo, the Jr. <br> Godofred Stuart Jr, <em>Butch</em>.<br> <em>Butch</em>, taken from the burly and benign weekly cartoon character<br> of the long-ago defunct Saturday Evening Post.<br> Godofredo. . . Hey, that's the Spanish form of Godfrey, meaning "friend of God."<br> And boys and girls, that's not bad company.<br> But alas, although recognizable and phonetically agreeable<br> to the vowel-laden language of my birthplace,<br> later on, the Godofredo would suffer countless misspellings, mutilations and permutations.<br> Godfred. Godfredo. Goodfred. Godfredd. Godredo. Gofrego.<br> Godofred. Gofredo. Gotfried. Gofdredo. Gofodredo. Gopofordo.<br> Gofopordo. Godolfredo<br> Even a couple of Js. . . Jodofredo. Jodofred. Jodredo. <br> I lost count . . . and stopped counting long ago,<br> thankful for the virtue of patience, that comes from being "friend of God"<br> when asked, those countless numbers of times, over the phone,<br> <strong>Um. . . can you please spell that?</strong><br> And always thankful I was not made to suffer the nickname mediocrity of "Junior."<br> <font size="+7">4</font><br> Maria was my yaya, or nanny. <br> She took care of the goat that was always in tow <br> during the sudden family departures in the hurry-scurry of the last months of the Japanese occupation.<br> The goat provided a supplement source of milk.<br> Perhaps it is cause for my aversion for caldereta or for that matter, any goat dish.<br> Back to Maria. . .My flirtatious yaya was called "Peaches" by the liberating G.I. Joes. <br> Alas, her young flirtatious life was ended by the ricochet of an accidentally fired GI Joe rifle.<br> Back to the goat.<br> After Maria's death, the task of attending to the nanny goat went to Adriana,<br> an eight-year old from Tiaong, taking it to the fields to graze, moving its stake a few times daily.<br> She must have hated the job.<br> One day she hurried back, running, winded and flustered<br> saying the goat was dead, bitten by a snake.<br> My father applied his medical skills for a veterinary postmortem.<br> Examination of the dead ruminant easily revealed the cause of death—<br> not by a venomous bite, but by half a dozen ice-pick stab wounds.<br> I heard Adriana returned to the bucolic rural life in Tiaong,<br> raised a family, with no other known SPCA-related crimes. <br> Nor did her single premeditated goat-killing progress to any known homicidal tendencies. <br> <font size="+7">5</font><br> Early on, I had lessons on trusting adults.<br> I was three. I had really curly hair. Big curls.<br> They thought that shaving it off clean would cause it to go straight on regrowth.<br> I overheard my father whispering the dastardly plot to the barber.<br> But as long as I could keep awake, it wasn't going to happen.<br> I was intent on fighting the barbershop sleepinessz z z z. . <br> Alas, I woke up bald as a ping pong.<br> But the curls grew back.<br> Oh. . . wilder and curlier.<br> <font size="+7">6</font><br> My mother kept a 3-year old photo.<br> It showed me with a big head, clean shaven,<br> probably taken after the dastardly barber-father conspiracy.<br> My mom said my head was really big, not hydrocephalic big,<br> but big. . . and they called me "Tommy Tomorrow."<br> Merciless.<br> My research revealed he was a DC comic book space hero that came out in 1947.<br> Tommy T. is blond and blue eyed.<br> I think it had to do with the space helmet he wore in some of his adventures.<br> And my head as big and round as his space helmet.<br> Merciless.<br> <font size="+7">7</font><br> When I was four, I was abandoned by my parents on weekends.<br> From my calculation, the family was growing. There were the two older siblings, Nancy and Sluggo.<br> I was third. My mother was probably pregnant. And there was another brother, Rollie,<br> between me and the pregnancy.<br> Every Sunday afternoon, I was deposited at my father's sister in Imus.<br> I remember the M&Ms and caramel corn bribes handed with the goodbye kisses and hugs.<br> It must have lessened their guilt.<br> There was a cousin, Ted, about my age, so they must have figured<br> a playmate was a mental health cushion for my weekly abandonment.<br> I was picked up Friday afternoon for weekend doses of family life.<br> Then redeposited Sunday with more M&Ms, caramel corn, kisses and hugs.<br> <font size="+7">8</font><br> I must have suffered those separations.<br> I remember the black bag stuffed with my weekend clothes and stuff.<br> Right after the kisses, hugs and goodbyes, I would hurry to my room,<br> palm the kisses off my cheeks, trying to remember what parent kissed what cheek-side<br> and wipe my palms on the sides of the bag,<br> a side for my father's kiss, the other side, my mother's.<br> During the week, when I missed them<br> I would go to the bag, and touch the kisses on each side.<br> Many many years later, I told my mother about it, and she cried.<br> She said I should have told them.<br> Yeah, how does a four year old argue<br> the parental wisdom of weekend abandoment<br> with a bagful of God's wonderful inventions,<br> caramel corn and M & Ms, mediating and mollifying,<br> bullying and bribing me into sufferance.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">9</font><font face="Arial"><br> I grew up with Dick and Jane. And, Spot.<br> It was the age before television, before the Ninja turtles and Barney and pals,<br> and all those cartoon characters that now baby-sits the preschool years.<br> It was a time when parents still found time and great delight in guiding their children<br> through their first musical ABCDEFG and ten little indians,<br> in their first reading adventures, stumbling through those silly and simple first lines:<br> See Dick run. See Jane run. See Dick and Jane run.<br> I don't remember what Spot did. <br> He must also have ran, on his full canine bladder, looking for his fire hydrant.<br> </font><font color="#FF0000" size="+7" face="Arial">10</font><font face="Arial"><br> I was a sleepwalker.<br> That is why I never got beyond Cub-Scouts.<br> I really wanted to become a Boy Scout.<br> But Boy Scouts went camping and my parents were afraid I'd sleepwalk and fall off a cliff.<br> There wasn't much to remember of my cub-scouting days,<br> except my pretty den-mother in her blue uniform—I had a precocious crush on her.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">11</font><font face="Arial"><br> When I was five or six, I was black for a day. <br> There was a children's costume party.<br> My father wanted me to go as Little Black Sambo. I refused.<br> He bought my resistance, promised me one peso.<br> I was painted black with Chinese ink.<br> Face, neck, hands and whatever showed out the edges of the colorful costume.<br> Red pants and yellow umbrella<br> There is a picture, the white of the eyes and the teeth grinning out of the blackened face.<br> The costume won a prize, second or third.<br> My father never gave me the peso.<br> Many many years later, I reminded him of the unpaid peso.<br> He just smiled, and still didn't pay the peso,<br> which must have depreciated to twenty cents of its original bargaining value. <br> </font><font color="#000000" size="+7" face="Arial">12</font><font face="Arial"><br> During the elementary school years, we lived in Manila,<br> moving from place to place, rental houses just blocks away from each other,<br> until a house was bought at the end of Don Pedro Street<br> abutting a sidestream of the Pasig River,<br> often stagnant with stench, water lilies and detritus,<br> The river swelled with the rains and the typhoons,<br> sometimes overflowing to the first floor,<br> bringing fish and an assortment of river debris.<br> Across the street was a cluster of squatter houses<br> which for many years would provide a 101 on the poor.<br> While my mother grew up in gentrified provincial privilege<br> where she was early on forbidden to talk with the servants,<br> in Don Pedro we lived in proximity to the poor,<br> developing a familiarity and closeness with them,<br> with nary a forbidding word from my parents.<br> I played with them, shared stories, entered their homes<br> and peeked at their lives and rituals.<br> Once, they slaughtered a dog, hanging on hind legs,<br> slitting the throat, the blood dripping on glasses<br> and drank for asthma and sundry other uses.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">13</font><font face="Arial"><br> My parents never prohibited me from mingling with the squatter folk.<br> In fact, I remember their helping them out many times.<br> It became easy and natural to talk to the street people,<br> to know the streetmongers by name,<br> to befriend vagrant kids and help out whenever,<br> lending them my father's well-appointed shoe-shine box<br> for their day's commerce of shining shoes,<br> afraid they might not return it at day's end. . . but they always did.<br> I remember my father frowning and pondering <br> the rapidly diminishing contents of the cans of shoe wax.<br> Surprisingly, the precocious street culture was not marred by delinquency,<br> other than the few street-roaming nights, throwing stones up the rooftops,<br> scampering away in juvenile glee as stones rattled down the metal roofs.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">14</font><font face="Arial"><br> I was a La Sallite, kindergarten through high school.<br> At that time, one in a short list of what may be considered "Ivy League" schools.<br> The school icon was the Green Archer: an archer with a funny green hat <br> and a matching green costume, the color of fresh spinach,<br> kneeling on one knee, bow and arrow drawn, its aim frozen at an imaginary target.<br> Or maybe, aimed at the rival icons: blue eagles, red lions or knights.<br> Later on you became aware of the rivalries, <br> the most intense of which, the blue eagles,<br> with that cheer that still reverberates in my memory banks,<br> Animo La Salle, beat Ateneo.<br> The rivalry still lingers on, albeit, just in the hardcourts of basketball.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">15</font><font face="Arial"><br> It was a great twelve years, punctuated early on by a first-in-class gold medal in Prep year.<br> Alas, it was my only flash of academic potential, as it became clear early on <br> that education was too long an effort to focus solely on academic achievements <br> to the detriment of education and experiences in the University of Life,<br> wonder years on the fringe with its doses of delinquent joys.<br> This early choice for juvenile anomie and academic underachievement<br> reflected on report cards, with the color-coded ABCD of deportment.<br> There were a lot of red-penciled Cs and Ds for bad behavior, <br> often dramatically circled or asterisked.<br> My mother kept those report cards, providing recorded memento<br> of an educational odyssey that was focused on just passing, <br> going for 75s, and shucking the pursuit of academic accolades. <br> Still, I was always a section-A student, except for a short-lived demotion to section-B<br> once in elementary school, whereupon, I was, soon enough, promoted back to section A.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">16 </font><font face="Arial"><br> My archer days were punctuated by appearances before the Board of Education.<br> This is a fearsome and threatening piece of wood, <br> about two feet long, six inches wide, an inch thick, with a good gripping handle<br> that dispensed its brand of corrective and corporeal punishment <br> by the rhythmic repetitive whapping of the palms.<br> It was torturous but short-lived enough to endure without tears.<br> And infrequent enough to put into the chapter of Rite of Passage<br> with lessons that lasted only as long as the redness and stinging of the chosen palm.<br> There were a number of whappings.<br> From after-school Breaking-and-Entering of the bookstore,<br> distributing the proceeds—school pins, pens and pencils—to kindred spirits.<br> Being caught entering the the gym metal grillworks for "free" admission to Friday night movies.<br> Minor infractions and blips in the journey of enlightenment and edification<br> that did not merit being brought to the attention of my parents.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">17</font><br> There were many other times of educational misconducts,<br> misdemeanors that did not merit corporeal whappings,<br> instead, kinder and gentler namby-pamby punishments,<br> like writing you full name one thousand times, <br> and suffering through those callus-inducing efforts<br> muttering a grievance of inequity, those times wishing<br> I was Chinese with a last name like Ty or Uy, a first name, like John.<br> But I devised a special writing tool - speeding through the punishement<br> with two pens tied together.<br> </font><font color="#000000" size="+7" face="Arial">18</font><font face="Arial"><br> Sometimes, there were punishments meted out after class.<br> When the teacher tells you to pull down your pants.<br> Then you get two or three mild plastic ruler pattings on the bare butt.<br> Many years later, older and wiser, I remember those times,<br> as pseudo-punishments done for the sexually gratifying tush-viewings.<br> Oh, the ruler-wielding teacher was gay.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">19</font><font face="Arial"><br> At home, corrective educational measures were also carried out.<br> Rarely, I brought home a report card with failing grades<br> when underachievement missed the safety zone of 75.<br> Again, highlighted in bold red pencil.<br> This would be met with the Belt of Education.<br> It's a mere three- or four-whapping strikes<br> always meted out by my father<br> and always preceded with the short parental apology disclaimer: <br> <strong>I hate doing this, but am doing so for your own good.</strong><br> Sometimes, it's bare-butt, sometimes, it's notebook-padded butt-covered whappings.<br> My father must have known about the notebook-padding <br> as padded-whappings made a different sound<br> The remedial whippings were rehabilitative,<br> invariably followed by a short period of overachievement,<br> the next report cards going north.<br> Soon after, corporeal punishment went out of vogue,<br> and the younger siblings were fortunately freed from the threat and welt of the belt<br> </font><font color="#FF0000" size="+7" face="Arial">20</font><font face="Arial"><br> In fifth or sixth grade, perhaps, even a year earlier<br> i had my first taste of a nicotine buzz.<br> A cousin and I picked up my father's Banker's Club cigarette butts,<br> scavenging off small mountains of ashtray remnants,<br> straightening the stubs, flicking off the ashes from the burnt tips,<br> happy for those longer than an inch.<br> A two-incher was nicotine heaven.<br> We coughed and gagged silly at first,<br> fast getting used to the burnt and bitter draws.<br> Afterwards, we would dry-wash the telltale smell of smoking,<br> swirling teaspoonfuls of Nescafe coffee grounds<br> (A measure that was also put to use with the first adolescent samplings of alcohol.) <br> By the time I quit at age 33, I was smoking more than two and a half packs a day.<br> </font><font color="#000000" size="+7" face="Arial">21</font><font face="Arial"><br> These were the days of radio and comic books,<br> long before television consumed the idle moments.<br> Radio was king, a big wooden box, pre-transistorization,<br> monolithic on the counter top, the whole family huddled around,<br> enthralled and mesmerized with the half-hour episodes<br> of action / drama serials, that ends, always, hanging in suspense, <br> to be continued, same time tomorrow.<br> Years later, I saw the how the magic was delivered,<br> with as great a fascination, watched radio-actors<br> reading scripts and emoting before their mikes, <br> while the effects guy produced from sundry objects,<br> coconut shells, ordinary pieces of everyday refuse,<br> reproducing the magic of sounds that gave resonacne to the stories.<br> </font><font color="#000000" size="+7" face="Arial">22</font><font face="Arial"><br> And there were the comics, providing graphics the radio couldn't.<br> Weekly doses of Tagalog comics, filled with black-and-white pen and ink art,<br> from which I endlessly copied, sketching, learning the ways of the drawing pen.<br> And the colorful American comic books, filling our worlds with action heroes,<br> the Lone Ranger, Tonto, Silver, Tommy Tomorrow and Buck Rogers, <br> and the Classics Illustrated that provided a bridge into literature<br> laden with heroes and adventures, with more cowboys and indians, <br> Boone and Bowie, Custer and Sitting Bull, <br> and the English not to be outdone, throwing in their colorful cast<br> of King Arthur and the Knights and the countless tragic Shakespearean heroes.<br> </font><font color="#000000" size="+7" face="Arial">23</font><font face="Arial"><br> And the yard games and street games we played – piko, patintero, touch, slap-hands.<br> Tex, flicking cards in the air, hoping for face-pairs as it lands on the ground.<br> Jolens, rolling marbles on holes in the ground.<br> Inventing betting games with rubber bands and bottle caps.<br> Making tops, slingshots, and toys with discards of strings, rubber and wood.<br> Collecting insects and catching dragonflies.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">24</font><font face="Arial"><br> I think I started dabbling in art when I was four. Mother also kept those early works.<br> This artistic flare was recognized early in my Archer days. And I put it to good use.<br> I was charged with the task of calligraphing the bimonthly achievement certificates in old-English.<br> Done during school hours, I was freed from the classroom boredom and lethargy.<br> And of course, this required masterful and unhurried attention.<br> Of course, a euphemism for milking the hours of freedom.<br> </font><font color="#000000" size="+7" face="Arial">25</font><font face="Arial"><br> Art also brought economic opportunities. <br> By sophomore year, I had a little business on the side.<br> Quite opportune, for I have started playing billiards and the pin-ball machines.<br> Expensive pastimes on a meager allowance. <br> I have started doing nude sketches to occupy myself<br> through the interminable hours of boredom and lectures.<br> Soon enough, the nudes caught the attention of some classmates.<br> And an art service-enterprise was born, sketching their daydreams and fantasies.<br> Classmates brought me black-and-white photographs of faces which I sketch into some likeness.<br> When some degree of facial likeness was achieved, and approved,<br> I would proceed to draw the rest of the anatomy in resplendent nudity.<br> In whatever pose or contortion they wished or dared to imagine.<br> It wasn't much, but the extra income was godsend.<br> It allowed for a more gastronomically filling recess time indulgence of a coke and a sandwich.<br> with residual jingles in the pocket for after school recreational games.<br> I had a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy <br> but could not refrain from contemplating the whence of these needs and fantasies<br> from what photo albums these photographs were borrowed from.<br> and strongly suspected the Oedipal roots of their desires<br> and was quite aware of their eventual palmar use.<br> I was merely the purveyor of pleasure.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">26</font><font face="Arial"><br> Alas, the enterprise did not last long enough to contribute to the nest egg.<br> Catholic remorse caught up with my creativity.<br> One day, I was approached by Brother C. who told me that a classmate,<br> despondent and overwhelmed with guilt, came to him with a portfolio of my nude sketches<br> confessing that every time he looked at them, he was overcome with sin.<br> I Kid you not! <br> Thankless horny bastard with his callused palms!<br> Brother C. then demanded that I hand over all my sketches of sin.<br> He could not believe there were no others,<br> that the sketches were made on-demand, commissioned.<br> I would have liked to have said: "For art."<br> But at that time, I had neither depth of art philosophy<br> or the polished arguments for the art of nudity.<br> Despite my repeated and imploring avowals that there was no cache of naked sketches <br> Brother C. gave me twenty-four hours to hand over the rest of the sinful collection.<br> He threatened to inform my parents if I failed to do so<br> And so. . .<br> deep into to the night and into the hours of morning,<br> I sketched with a frenzied pen, page after page of women<br> in varying degrees of undress and wanton nakedness.<br> The next morning, bleary-eyed, I handed him my Portfolio-of-Sin.<br> And. . . <br> a few days later, my parents were summoned to the principal's office<br> to discuss the grievousness of my sins and the threatening possibility of expulsion.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">27</font><font face="Arial"><br> My mother came out of the principal's office at the tail-end of her tears.<br> I am not sure if she was shown the contents of the art-portfolio.<br> She never told me.<br> Maybe she was told of the sins my work generated.<br> She never told me.<br> But she told the principal of my precocious penchant for art,<br> of the unavoidable nudity in the gifts of art books.<br> And she told me, too: <strong>Godofredo! Do you know how much I had to beg for you?</strong><br> (My mother only used "Godofredo" in states of extreme exasperation and frustration.)<br> And in the end, the sentence was dispensed with Christian Brother compassion.<br> Suspension instead of expulsion. <br> And I was not allowed to return to Religion class, resultiing in my first ever "Failed" grade<br> and for which I had to suffer making up with summer school.<br> What was the lesson? None.<br> Or, maybe, some.<br> Looking back, I should have done and sold the art with a disclaimer:<br> <strong>Sin at your own expense.</strong><br> Or, since they were unsigned works of sin, I could have said:<strong> <br> Not mine!</strong> Or<strong>. . . Prove it!<br> </strong> And I know who sold me out, and karma has dealt him appropriate vengeance.<br> And Brother C? I suffered and sacrificed a sleepless night of sketching nudity,<br> with his reassurance that my parents would not be called in.<br> And in the end, my mother still suffered the ignominy of pleadiing for my academic survival.<br> It is his good fortune, I have embraced the teachings of Christian forgiveness and Gandhi's nonviolence.<br> And that I live and practice the meaning of my given name: friend of God. . . sometimes.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">28</font><font face="Arial"><br> Catholicism really packages sin like no other religion.<br> What can be more original than Original Sin.<br> Adam and Eve, the Serpent and a Tree,<br> fruits plump with promises and possibilities.<br> Serpent catches Eve at a vulnerable time of the month,<br> Eve bites the apple, passes it to Adam boy, tellin him: You'd better!<br> And Adam gives it a bite, as God screamed "What the hell happened?"<br> Adam pointing blame on Eve who was pointing at the snake who couldn't really point.<br> And from this sorry scene that caused the sorry fall of man came the innateness of sin.<br> Jesus H. Christ! That is mother-fluggin' deep.<br> And Adam didn't even swallow it. It got stuck, became known as the Adam's apple.<br> Then second-son Cain killed first-son Abel.<br> But when asked, his hands still bloody, Cain exclaimed in histrionic incredulity:<br> <strong>Am I my brother's keeper?</strong><br> Adam, the apple biter. <br> Eve, abettor and co-biter. <br> Abel, murdered.<br> Cain, murderer.<br> Original sin and all, don't ponder why we are what we are.<br> That biblical first family was not known to be good role models.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">29</font><font face="Arial"><br> So we grew up in theologic fear, days threatened by eternal damnation.<br> We were taught the complexities of sin,<br> learned about the different sins: venial sins and mortal sins.<br> Venial sin was graphically depicted as a dotted white heart,<br> the dots represent minor sins.<br> You can have a thousand dots or venial sins, it will not deprive the soul of divine grace.<br> You can still make it to heaven, although you might have to pass through purgatory and serve time.<br> Examples of venial sin: lying, cursing. Cheating, maybe.<br> Mortal sin fills your graphic white heart with black, even just one silly mortal sin.<br> A mortal sin is deep shit serious.<br> Whether you have one or twenty, dying with a heart blackened with mortal sin,<br> takes you straight to hell.<br> No pit stops to the fires of eternal damnation.<br> No ifs or buts, no plea bargainings. <br> Examples of mortal sin: Breaking any of the ten commandments. <br> Missing mass on the Lord's day.<br> Adultery. <br> Masturbation, the priest told me. <br> I guess it's includes coveting your neighbor's wife or daughter. <br> </font><font color="#0000FF" size="+7" face="Arial">30</font><font face="Arial"><br> I was hoping mastubation could be reclassified into a venial sin.<br> Imagine a thousand masturbatory venial dots.<br> And still make it to heaven !!!<br> Alas, I was told an ecumenical edict canceled venial sin and purgatory.<br> and canceled St Christopher's sainthood.<br> I hope not. It would make for a tougher time for sinners.<br> Venial sin, peccato veniale, is a great concept.<br> It allowed heaven despite a profusion of minor sins.<br> Purgatory, likewise, a flaming expiatory pit stop on the way to heaven.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">31</font><font face="Arial"><br> Still, original sin and sins from messenger Moses's stone tablets <br> with ten sure-to-be-broken commandments weren't enough<br> to burden our lives with the threat of fiery destinations,<br> a pit-stop in purgatory or eternal damnation in hell.<br> Sometime, way post-Calvary, new sins were laid down.<br> The Cardinal Sins, aka, the Seven Deadly Sins.<br> Wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony.<br> Fortunately, along with making sin out of human frailties,<br> seven Sacraments were formulated – baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist,<br> penance, ordination, matrimony and extreme unction –<br> many of them sin-erasing and grace-imbuing.<br> Extreme unction . . . the 'last rites,' the annointing of the dying,<br> if you're lucky to have the padre around, it's a straight pass to heaven.<br> Thank God for Sacraments.<br> Jeeper creepers! Without them, Hell would be a hell of a crowded place.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">32</font><font face="Arial"><br> So we grew up waging a war on sin.<br> Daily doses of Religion class, from kindergarten to fourth-year high.<br> Teachings that included sainthood and martyrdom.<br> There was this classic hypothetical test for matyrdom, <br> the Saracen blade on your neck.<br> Denounce your faith, and you live.<br> Admit to your Catholicism, and die.<br> Whoa! Even with a 100 virgins, that's a no-brainer.<br> There were other extracurricular salvation-focused activities.<br> Like learning to serve mass, an endeavor that required the memorization of the mass in Latin.<br> But more important, becoming an acolyte was a hedge on Religion grade, <br> an automatic extra five points added.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">33</font><font face="Arial"><br> Then, there was the plenary indulgence.<br> For non-Catholics this might be incomprehensible.<br> Plenary indulgences are like "salvation coupons" acquired through prayer and sacrifice. <br> It gives an assurance of an opportunity to die in a "state of grace."<br> I accumulated a good number of them, a reassuring number to take me to heaven's gate.<br> But I have no idea if they might have been canceled together with venial sin, purgatory, and st christopher.<br> Holy gazoonkas! Salvation coupons with expiry dates.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">34</font><font face="Arial"><br> There was a once-a-month sacramental cleansing.<br> Confession, one day, and communion, the followiing day.<br> Classes were interrupted one at a time, and the students, en bloc, would march to the chapel.<br> There were confessionals on both sides.<br> Sin-cleansing boxes invented by the religion that invented original sin.<br> These mysteriously forbidding dark-varnished gothic wooden movable structures<br> with kneeling spaces on opposite sides, with tiny grilled and thickly curtained windows<br> that opened to a darkened cubicle in the middle, where sits the confessor<br> to whom you spill out in whispered guilt, the day, week or month's accumulation of sins.<br> And in a boy's school raging with new-found testosterone, <br> the sins were most likely mortal sins of palmar self-abuse, fueled or aided by generic sexual fantasies.<br> Or at the least: <strong>Bless me father, for I have sinned. . . I had impure thoughts. . . again.</strong><br> For a long time, my sins were fueled by black and whites of Kim Novak's cleavage,<br> Jane Russell sprawled in the barn hay, and of course, Marylyn Monroe's Seven-Year-Itch pic.<br> </font><font color="#000000" size="+7" face="Arial">35</font><font face="Arial"><br> After absolution comes penance, usually Our Fathers and Hail Marys<br> in a number determined by the gravity of sin, with which we are dispatched to the altar rail<br> where we kneel in quiet penitence, hurrying through the silent recitation of penance,<br> not wanting to take conspicuously long, lest it causes conjecture on your sins' gravity.<br> Once I was given a long sentence of penance, <br> I became conscious of the changing of penitents on the altar rail. <br> I had to do my penance in two segments.<br> The following morning, the student body assembles in the chapel for mass and communion.<br> A monthly congregation young boys, souls blindeningly white with grace.<br> As the pews empty in hushed shuffling.<br> Once, or twice, I was left sitting alone and dreadfully conspicuous<br> in the middle of rows of emptied benches, suffering the knowing glare<br> of the cleansed and pious on their way to the altar rail to receive the communion host. <br> <strong>What sin hast thou committed? The penance still fresh from thy lips!<br> </strong>A venial sin still allowed you to take communion.<br> But at an age raging with testosterone and bedeviled by generic temptations<br> the twenty four hours between penance and communion<br> is a sufferingly too long a period of time to remain in the requisite state of grace<br> to partake in the sacramental bread-and-wine body-and-blood celebration.<br> I confess I have gone to the altar, many a time, my soul black as sin.<br> Thank god for plenary indulgencess and salvation coupons.<br> </font><font color="#000000" size="+7" face="Arial">36</font><font face="Arial"><br> But there were also doses of non-curricular religion. <br> Severe doses of domestic religion.<br> In the province, grandparental orchestrated evening prayers.<br> Nightly rosaries in Tagalog, all 53 beads, replete with mysteries.<br> At home, I remember a few years, likewise, of nightly prayers<br> and wednesday novenas to the Mother of Perpetual Help,<br> complete with hymns and litanies.<br> On Holy Thursdays, making rounds of churches on the way to Imus.<br> Doing countless Stations of the Cross.<br> Later on, as life becomes more complicated and arduous,<br> as challenges piled up and failures threatened,<br> with God and the Virgin Mary overwhelmed with humanity's desperate prayers,<br> there were saints, patron saints galore, specialized for all different human needs,<br> for all professions, even patron saints for lawyers.<br> Growing up, the most often called upon was St. Jude.<br> St. Jude, patron saint of the Impossible,<br> for all those emergent, desperate and hopeless times. <br> A favorite go-to saint by students as the semester nears its end.<br> And when you feel you have been abandoned by the saints,<br> there's your guardian angel.</font><font face="Arial"><br> </font><font color="#000000" size="+7" face="Arial">37</font><font face="Arial"><br> These are high school years in a boy's school.<br> Of new and raging testosterone.<br> Before Playboy, before Hustler.<br> Before Technicolor sin.<br> This was time when masturbatory alternatives to the classy photos of Kim, Marilyn and Jane<br> were palm-sized newsprint editions of porn <br> with blurred black-and-white copulatory images interspersed<br> between pages of titillating porn stories in Tagalog.<br> They were sold as "Bedtime Stories" or "Fighting Fish."<br> Familiar components to the litany of regularly confessed sins.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">38</font><font face="Arial"><br> But the testosterone started intruding upon childhood innocence<br> long before Kim, Jane and Marilyn.<br> Way back in elementary school, there were early doses of Sex 101.<br> The earliest was the unsettling awareness of a that strange excitement<br> when the maid would soaped me all over in my daily showers.<br> Whoa! What is this that thrills, tingles and excites?<br> After a number of times, I went to my mother and said: <br> <strong>I think I am old enough to do my own showers now.</strong><br> My mother, surprised at my precocity, could only muster a sheepish <strong>"Oh. . . ok."</strong><br> And a little later on I realized how stupid, stupid, stupid that was,<br> prematurely giving up a childhood perk,<br> instead of milking it to its hormonally raging end.<br> Really, stupid, stupid, stupid.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">39</font><font face="Arial"><br> Another time, I came upon the laundry woman take a break from her washing,<br> pull out her post-partum milk-filled breast and started squeezing it <br> as I watched in amazement at the long curving line of squirting milk.<br> She said she was cleaning it.<br> And asked if I wanted to taste it<br> . . . as long as I promised not to tell my mother.<br> She put a few drops on her finger.<br> I remember how intensely sweet it was.<br> </font><font color="#0000FF" size="+7" face="Arial">40</font><font face="Arial"><br> As the testosterone started to rage in elementary school years,<br> sex became a subject of increasing interest and exploration,<br> beyond the generic palmar indulgences<br> before the availability of more graphic 'bedtime stories' porn,<br> and thank God, way way before cyber porn.<br> But from a serious effort and complicated process of cajolement, <br> I was able to convince a cousin to be our object of sexual intercourse<br> and fulfill our hormonally confused Grail.<br> The initiates included two other cousins, I guess, early groupies.<br> The two level house shared by four or five families <br> required serious planning for a midnight rendezvous.<br> In the quiet of the night, we met on the second floor bathroom.<br> In hushed conspiratorial silence, we embarked on a menage-a-quarto,<br> my cousin standing, her back against the wall, <br> lifting her skirt and pulling down her panties.<br> The three of us - I was the lead-boy in an unhurried line,<br> pulled out our preadolescent weenies<br> and stepped forward in an orderly fashion, holding our little limp organs<br> lightly touching it to the cousin's sacrificial pudendum<br> then proceeding to the back of the short line for a second and third time.<br> Alas, all severely Catholic boys and girl, guilt and sin burdened their souls,<br> or perhaps, just a case of blabbering and bragging rights.<br> In just a few days, it had snuck into my mother's grapevine.<br> I still remember her shrill screams, in incredible decibels of incredulity:<br> <strong>What! You put your <em>pititing</em> (penis) into her <em>chichay</em> (vagina) !!! ???</strong><br> <strong>Huh ! Huh !</strong> . . . streched out in anger.<br> <strong>What! What! </strong>. . . echoing with her disbelief.<br> She finally settled down when she surmised from the Q and A <br> that there was no penetration.<br> Soon after, there was another effort of cajolery on another cousin. . . alas. . . that failed.<br> </font><font color="#000000" size="+7" face="Arial">41</font><font face="Arial"><br> Soon the cousins left and one of the bottom rooms were rented to a woman, E.<br> In the pie in the sky of pre-teen yearnings,<br> this was a slice of pie served by the muse of preadolescent dreams.<br> Every day after school, I would pass by her window by the bottom of the steps.<br> Many times I never made it up the steps.<br> E. was always there during the day. She worked nights.<br> She always had comic books by her bed.<br> I visited her room every chance I had.<br> and sat with her in her bed, to pretend to read her comic books<br> while I gazed at her past the edges of the comic book pages.<br> She was beautiful.<br> and always smelled of a sinful concoction of scents.<br> Perhaps, it was just the generic fragrance of bath soap.<br> But it made me dizzy in the delights of scent and forbidden sights.<br> She always wore something light and wispy, that bared part of herself.<br> Slivers of openings that revealed verboten patches of flesh.<br> In the afternoons, the window by the bed would catch the late sun<br> and the bathe the room with its ethereal glow<br> as the magic of light and shadows would slowly reveal<br> through the thin veil of thin and wispy, the sensuous curves of her breasts<br> and her nipples punctuating the carnal vision.<br> One day, too soon, she was gone.<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">42</font><font face="Arial"><br> Many summers of childhood were spent in Tiaong,<br> in that ancestral stone house with the sculpture of the half-naked Elias<br> at the center of the horseshoe-shaped pool, <br> inspired and drawn from Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, <br> frozen in time, in his brawn and bravado, battling a crocodile<br> that symbolized the common man's struggle against the collective burgis.<br> The house was built in 1927 to Tomas Mapua's architectural design,<br> historied by the Japanese occupation and damaged by the liberation bombing.<br> It houses many childhood memories.<br> Doña Concha and Don Tomas.<br> They orchestrated many of our childhood days.<br> A grandmother who lorded over and ran the business of their land.<br> A grandfather, charmed by beauty, who doted over his grandchildren, <br> Growing up with cousins, with the embellishments of provincial privilege.<br> Weekend picnics in the rivers, tree rafts afloat with lunch and delicadies.<br> Carabao cart rides through the coconut plantations<br> or walking the narrow footpaths of the ricelands.<br> When the grandparents died, the house slowly went into disuse.<br> And except for occasional shortlived occupancies<br> inevitably aging into disrepair, abandonment and hauntedness.<br> It still stands. . . the oldest house in Tiaong,<br> relic and repository that reminds of a time past, <br> with its colonial trimmings, the age of the hacienderos, <br> the Japanese occupation, a childhood that many shared,<br> and the many ignominuous stories of kin, old and recent – <br> most edging into the fringes of memory and unremembered.<br> But what remains, after all these years, is Doña Concha.<br> Remembered for her charity, for the many parcels of land<br> she has contributed to the remote barangays of Tiaong,<br> and the many schools erected and dedicated in her name.<br> <font size="+7">43</font><br> In high school I was warned masturbation can make you mad,<br> adding to a lengthening list of life-restricting words of caution,<br> many, all, eventually debunked by time:<br> If you go to bed with your hair wet, you will wake up blind.<br> Walking after a meal will give you appendicitis.<br> If you jump up and down, as high as you can, on Good Saturday, you will grow taller.<br> I didn't grow tall. <br> Nor go blind.<br> Never had appendicitis.<br> And I'm not mad. . . (I think.)<br> <font size="+7">44</font><br> Around third year high school, Banlon shirts came out.<br> Synthetic, status-imposing and slinky in the way it hugged your body.<br> Early on, it was an object of envy.<br> You washed it with great and delicate care,<br> dried it off by rolling it inside towels.<br> <font size="+7">45</font><br> The last year of high school, I was somewhat frantic.<br> The years of underachievement flew by.with delightful and delinquent frivolity.<br> The year would end with the Graduation Year Book, with pictures embellished <br> with the list of extracurricular activities. Mine will have no such gravitas.<br> I think I joined the Chess Club, maybe something else.<br> There was still a rather empty expanse of white space under my picture.<br> It is traditional to pass the year book around <br> for your classmates' signatures and dedications.<br> I read the assortment of dedications on the other classmates' yearbooks.<br> Most were empowering words fork life's coming challenges,<br> Some laced with affirming recognition and expectation: <strong>Most likely to succeed.</strong><br> Alas, mine had none of those. <br> I would have settled for something like: Thanks for the memories. <br> But no luck on that.<br> But one stuck like glue to memory,<br> and perhaps, fairly summarized my days as an archer:<br> <strong>To Butch, the class character.</strong><br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">46</font><br> Despite these inglorious attributions, I am most fortunate for the La Sallite education.<br> Yes, it had many educational shortcomings.<br> A sanitized, abridged and censored teaching of Philippine history<br> a bare modicum of Philippine literature,<br> with a literary landscape laden with Shakespeare<br> memorizing oratory extracts of Mark Anthony, Brutus, <br> bursting at the seams with the classics and its motley of characrters –<br> Crusoe, Moby Dick, Pocahontos, Daniel Boone, Custer and Sitting Bull.<br> Comics providing cartoons and color with Lone Ranger, Tonto and Silver.<br> and the half dozen or more of other superheroes.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">47</font><br> And too much religion. Severe doses of religion.<br> From the early years of cathechismal rote,<br> to help remember who made me and why God made me –<br> to know Him, to love Him and to serve Him.<br> The seriously thick pages of the bible,<br> bursting at the seams with stories of miracles, murder and mayhem.<br> From the incredible seven days of creation,<br> to-date, an unsurpassed engineering feat,<br> to the early pages smeared with original sin and bloodied by Cain's first homicide.<br> Lot's wife turning to salt. Jonah swallowed by the whale. . . and surviving.<br> And man, oh, man. Moses and the parting of the Red Sea.<br> Jesus H. Christ, that is one seriously over-the-top miracle.<br> And that is Old Testament.<br> The New Testament is just a miracle-heavy.<br> Four authors–Matthew, Mark, Luke and John writing about the King of the Jews.<br> Timeless parables, sermons and beatitudes.<br> Timeless characters: the good sam and the prodigal son.<br> Top-notch miracles. Water into wine. Loaves and fishes. Raising of Lazarus.<br> And his miracle-le-gran, His own resurrection.<br> Who needs fiction, when there is this is a pulse-racing read in one volume,<br> free, in every hotel room bedside drawer?<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">48</font><br> If that's not enough, there's monthly confessions, communions and benedictions.<br> Confessions and communions were sort of interactive.<br> The benedictions I never figured out.<br> Just some ritual of incense burning and smoke fogging up the altar<br> and the priest murmuring unintelligible Latin.<br> What's the point of all these?<br> Um . . . just that. . . there was a lot of religion.<br> And with more than 300 years of Christianity and colonization,<br> and severely Catholic parents, there really wasn't much choice.<br> I would still prefer that over some religion that requires you to pray five times a day<br> that shuns the open appreciation of the beauty of women, that rages a holy war on unbelievers.<br> even if it promises seventy plus virgins for your martyrdom.<br> I'd much rather embrace a religion where you find virgins and get slapped with a mortal sin,<br> rather than die blowing yourself up, before you get to one or seventy plus.<br> Now. . . Rastafarianism with the cannabis rituals. . . <br> Hmm. . . I have to think about that.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">49</font><br> What a game.<br> Life's first quarter far from finished and already burdened by several realities and events.<br> I was a mistake, a product of a failed rhythm method. Merciless.<br> Called Tommy Tomorrow early on. Merciless.<br> Weekend abandonments, early on. Merciless.<br> And now leaving the hallowed halls of high school as "class character."<br> Um. . . merciless.<br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">50</font><br> I wanted to go to Art School, and even Europe was bandied about.<br> But as I was graduating from High School, <br> my older brother, who was on his third year of premedical school,<br> developed mumps and its dreaded complication: orchitis.<br> Orchitis or not, I think my brother just wanted out.<br> Alas, both my parents were physicians, and inevitable was the campaign<br> to place the onus of their Hippocratic dream <br> of having a physican for the family and the clan on my shoulders.<br> My mother, the nominal healer, retired soon after graduation<br> for the nobler calling of motherhood <br> and the eventual seven children of rabid and disparate temperaments<br> she had the intermittently harrowing and frustrating task of raising.<br> It was father who practiced his kind of country medicine to the end,<br> and I the frequent young companion, tugging along in his housecalls,<br> to whom he deposited for safekeeping, the patients' warm jars of urine.<br> But keeper-of-warm-jars-of-pee didn't enkindle me into medicine.<br> Maybe, it was his war-time stories of making rounds in Japanese garrisons,<br> and saving many from death or torture by diagnosing them with illnesses,<br> like tuberculosis or some kind of plague that might spread in the camps,<br> the poor souls summarily banished from the garrison to die their imagined deaths.<br> Good story, but it wasn't that either that took me from art to medicine.<br> I think is was just the dutiful son surrendering his earlier dreams<br> to a parental wish and plea to have a son follow in their footsteps.<br> Hell. Mr Mistake. Mr Class Character. Mr Dutiful son.<br> Did I really have a choice?<br> </font><font size="+7" face="Arial">51</font><font face="Arial"><br> Already edematous and saturated with theology,<br> I segued from the moulding hands of the Christian Brothers <br> to the educational citadel of the Dominican fathers.<br> From the ivy-leagued halls of La Salle <br> to the melting-potted environs of Santa tomas.<br> I became glaringly aware of the benefits of archerhood.<br> Archer roots provided an edge—a certain hubris, a kind of panache<br> that elicited varying amounts of awe—and its own subtle strut.<br> More noticeably, it was an edge in English.<br> Doing the math, it would be 20 fluggin' years of an educational life<br> ruled by men garbed in their white religious garbs.<br> But nonetheless, for the next eight years, I was a Thomasian, <br> dedicating three years of semesters and three years of summer school<br> completing the four years of premedical school in three and the five years of medical school.<br> I continued my pursuit of education, in continuing committment to underachievement, <br> with the mastery of the tools and ways of achieving passing grades:<br> cramming, cramming, and more cramming,<br> and if that faills, missed exams and special make-up exams.<br> Absences were maxed to the limit.<br> Sneaked out crawling after roll-call to catch the peso and ten first showing in movie houses. <br> Passing continued to be no-sweat easy.<br> Still, once, I embarked on an effort to prove to myself <br> that underneath the chronic underachievement<br> I was capable of putting together a semester of graded excellence. <br> And indeed, I put out an impressive academic semester.<br> <font size="+7">52</font><br> Medical school was five more years of undersachievment. <br> rife with conflicts, recurring anomie and seasonal personal doubts. <br> It was somewhat facilitated by attending it in Santo Tomas<br> where both parents, both physicians, were alumni,<br> and quite a number of the professors were their previous classmates. <br> But glaring underachievement was again marked by a demotion to section-B, <br> and a semester later, re-promotion.<br> <font size="+7">53</font><br> Underachievement was sadly occasionally facilitated and fueled by educational dishonesty.<br> Not just the usual venial sin peeks on your seat-mates test papers<br> or the system of signals or whispered transfers of answers.<br> This was the commerce of exam papers sold off-the-press,<br> a source of added income for professor's secretaries or lab assistants<br> selling educational aids to the educationally lazy.<br> <font size="+7">54</font><br> Medicine was a journey through a long pass-door of the the truly unfamiliar,<br> a gauntlet of daunting challenges and a recurring question of resolve,<br> each year journeying deeper into an adventure of learning,<br> weaving the sciences and subjects together.<br> Freshman anatomy was the initiation in our quest of learning.<br> Rows of cadavers in stainless steel beds, shrouded in white, <br> the room heavy with the reek of formalin that clung to our white coats, <br> slicing on and cutting through the nameless and bloodless dead,<br> our first teachers in a long arduous aspiration<br> their shreds and fragments filling up the buckets<br> their mass burial accompanied with our prayers and gratitude:<br> <strong>That from the dead, we learn for the living.</strong><br> <font size="+7">55</font><br> Then, the assault by a daunting array of subjects, squeamishness slowly shed.<br> Brains and hearts staring you from formalin jars.<br> Jerking frog legs in physiology class.<br> Parasites and the army of worms that fed into evidence-based phobias<br> for sushi and rare and bleeding slabs of steak.<br> Knowledge seamlessly segued from theory to practicum,<br> the iconic stethoscope amplying the sounds <br> of heart beats, breath sounds and borborygmi,<br> as skills became defined and honed <br> and slowly we came to our inclinations.<br> My earlier dreams of becoming a neurosurgeon, slowly fading<br> and irrevocably consumed by the malady of underachievement.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">56</font><br> Of course, there was never any dream or attempts at scholastic distinction.<br> No summa cum laude, magna cum laude, or even cum laude.<br> My goal, as always, was Pasado Bastante,<br> a goal that lowered the achievement bar <br> and allowed for concurrent courses in the University of Life.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">57</font><br> The first summer break, I was asked to a attend summer school for a friend's friend.<br> In my anomie and unquenchable thirst for enlightenment, I agreed.<br> I divulged it nonchalantly to my parents, whom I thought would merely shake their heads<br> in generic disbelief and consenting resignation for my unending delinquent behavior.<br> Alas, it was met with great dismay and anxiety, <br> and to boot, advice and counsel from a lawyer-uncle<br> who warned me of criminal complicity in fraud, <br> in the threshold of endeavors in the most noble of professions, medicine.<br> And all of that fell on deaf ears.<br> In the anonymity of an unfamiliar univeristy,<br> I attended a summer class on Public Speaking and Debate as Arturo C.<br> Every one was required to stand up in front to deliver a sample of oration.<br> The class, impressed by my delivery, voted me class president.<br> From the teacher, I sensed a fondness and admiration.<br> When summer school ended, he invited me to join his debating team.<br> I suffered a pang of typical Christian guilt. <br> The following semester, he searched out Arturo C to join the debate club.<br> There was an exchange of confused incredulity and denials<br> between him and the real Arturo C.<br> <strong>But you're not Arturo C. . .</strong><em> Yes, I am, but I didn't</em><strong>. . .But your name. . </strong><em>Yes, but that's not me</em><strong>. . . <br> There must be another. . </strong><em>There's only one.</em><strong> . . This is your transcript. . .<br> </strong><em>Yes, but I'm not</em><strong>. . . </strong><br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">58</font><br> By sophomore year, music intruded into my academic endeavors.<br> Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Buddy Holly, Paul Anka were fading into the background of fifties rock.<br> Instrumental rock bounded into the scene and the Ventures reigned supreme.<br> For a while, music stopped singing, as guitars twanged and reverbed.<br> RJ and the Riots ruled for a short while.<br> Walk Don't Run became the instrumental anthem.<br> Then came folk music, it's beginnings traced back to Kingston Trio (Tom Dooley),<br> Joan Baez, the Bob Dylan. Then, Peter, Paul and Mary.<br> But as folk music was rooted in tradition and fueled by dissent<br> that was starting to swell and eventually rage in America, <br> we embraced it here for the melody and harmony.<br> for the simple and comprehensible messages and metaphors of love and love's loss<br> with the real anger and discontent and protest that rang between the lines.<br> <font size="+7">59</font><br> The group was called Two and A Lady,<br> our repertoire filled with Peter Paul and Mary songs<br> which we sang with good harmony, albeit, short of passion.<br> How could you sing otherwise? <br> World War II and the Japanese occupation distanced by decades.<br> With no revolution in our souls, they were empty lyrics.<br> Apolitical souls in the halcyon days in a place still called the Tiger of Asia.<br> We sang folk, making appearances on television shows and campus concerts.<br> For television shows, we taped into the morning hours.<br> In between waits and takes, peeking into thick medical books in tow<br> for next day's exam or some makeup exam or a special-exam for a missed make-up exam.<br> We sang till we splintered. We splintered because the Lady left.<br> It was a nice patch of time.<br> A musical interlude in the midst of medical college.<br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">60</font><br> Now I must confess. <br> All those years of Two and A Lady, I was in love with the lady.<br> The raging hormones, testosterone oozing off hair follicles and sweat glands.<br> The intolerable painful physical closeness.<br> I wrote long letters, avowals of love.<br> Letters never sent, consigned to a shoebox, <br> testament to a calvary of unrequited love. <br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">61</font><br> The dollar exchanged to four pesos. A peso bought a pack of Camel.<br> Short time motel rooms, P19.50.<br> <font size="+7">62</font><br> I continued to dabble in art; the passion, constant and simmering.<br> Warhol's Brillo Pad works came out '64.<br> Huh? Gee. Brillo Pads.<br> Art beckoned and every year brought an occasion or two refueling doubts that Medicine was a mistake.<br> And my mother was always ready with a parry and a tempering advice.<br> <strong>You have but four years left. Then, you can devote yourself to art for the rest of your life.</strong><br> A year later. . . <br> <strong>You have three years left. Then you can. . .</strong> and by then, I have lost the taste for battle. <br> Art took a respite, and I dedicated myself to the task of completing my medical studies. <br> <font size="+7">63</font><br> By fourth year, the academic landscape had changed.<br> We moved from the classrooms to the clinics, <br> from froglegs and cadavers to really sick people.<br> Real blood, real suppuration, real dying, real dead.<br> Searching, shelving, and sorting through tomes of theory<br> to connect the incredible dots of symptoms and signs.<br> strutting in our whites, adorned with badge of the black stethoscope slung on our necks.<br> <font size="+7">64</font><br> 1968. Warhol came up with Campbell's Soup 1.<br> It was a seminal event for me. Blew me away.<br> I was incredulous and dazed with delight.<br> This is art? Jesus H. Christ.<br> Yes, of course, it is art.<br> Yes. . . and in America, such things are possible.<br> I was irrevocably hooked.<br> And America beckoned, stronger<br> <font size="+7">65</font><br> Internship was a whirlwind year, and a blur.<br> A twelve-month internship outside the restricting environs of the Dominican citadel.<br> from one affliliate speciality hospital or clinic to the next, doing the required rotations.<br> There is not much I can remember of the last year.<br> Just two events.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">66</font><br> Other than being voted president as Arturo C, <br> my academic life has been devoid of political aspirations.<br> My Thomasian years were almost so.<br> Like the Archer years, I did not seek membership in organizations. <br> There were two medical fraternities: Caduceus, I think, and Tau Mu.<br> I had invitations to join both, enticed by one that they would go easy on me,<br> I still declined the benefits of their brotherhood.<br> By that time, I think, I have long played and marched<br> to the rhythms and sounds of different drums.<br> As senior-year elections were nearing, I joked that I would run for president.<br> A fried laughed, said I couldn't win against the frat boys.<br> I ran and I won.<br> And was burdened with almost immediate regrets.<br> Antisocial, prone to isolationism and protracted periods of solitude,<br> I did not have the desire nor ability for the activities of office.<br> I disappeared almost immediately, thankful for the female president counterpart<br> and the male vice-president who took over the helm.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">67</font><br> The other, my rotation in obstetrics, in a government hospital providing service to the indigent.<br> The every third night call was shared with another intern, <br> working into inevitalbe exhaustion into the morning hours,<br> manning rows of tables, often filled with gravidas<br> screaming in obstetrical pain, promising: <strong>Never again.</strong><br> Sometimes they never made it to the table,<br> One completed the delivery in a taxicab.<br> But most nights, we sit, gowned and gloved,<br> gazing at progressive bulging of vaginas as the head pushes forward,<br> scissors in hand ready to deliver the primigravida's episiotomy,<br> or expectant for the multigravida's hasty delivery.<br> While a nurse goes around measuring cervical dilations,<br> announcing "placenta out," or warning of imminent deliveries, <br> or frantically screaming: <strong>Baby out!</strong><br> If there was time, we would rush to the bucket of Phisohex<br> for a hurried effort of glove disinfection.<br> Some times, you just rush to the "baby coming out" table, the baby half out,<br> to guide it in the last stage of vaginal passage,<br> hastily cutting and clamping the cord,<br> and rushing to another table and gravida<br> to quietly gaze at another head entering the world,<br> lost in the discordant chorus of screaming women.<br> One night, at brink of exhaustion,<br> a baby slipped through my hands, did a half-somersault, <br> <em>kerplunked</em> and squished into a bucket half-filled with placenta. <br> I did a few post-delivery follow-ups on the infant,<br> making sure the baby was moving all fours and crying heartily.<br> The baby was fine and the parents were delighted and thankful for the follow up care<br> unaware of their baby's precocious circus act.<br> <font size="+7">68</font><br> The last year's tuition was less than a thousand pesos.<br> <font size="+7">69</font><br> I got my diploma, in its traditional beige and expensive texture,<br> laden with the essential and impressive Latin.<br> I never framed it. It's folded somewhere, hopelessly creased.<br> In fact, I never framed or hung diplomas and certificates.<br> I was often badgered about the absence of framed parchment in my office rooms.<br> <font color="#0000FF" size="+7">70</font><br> For many, graduation was the prologue for the American dream.<br> The interim offered few other choices; for some, specialized hospital residencies.<br> I chose the adventure of pharmaceutical-sponsored medical missions,<br> with its opportunity for traveling the islands and provinces free,<br> Memorable were the town feasts that awaited us in the hosting towns<br> and the inevitable evenings of bacchanalia.<br> Somewhere way up north, in the middle of a mission clinic, I was handed a telegram:<br> <strong>Your father dead. Awaiting you for burial.</strong><br> Seeking catharsis, I ran into the wind, with nowhere to go but the limits of an exhausting sprint.<br> A circuitous rural travel of a boat ride, a connection of jeepney rides<br> and a long bus ride took me back to Manila,<br> sobbing through lonely hours of grief and loss, wondering at its suddenness,<br> assured by a certainty that my mother was comforted by the love of family.<br> In too long a stretch of bus-bumpy grief, I even imagined him in the coffin<br> in peaceful repose, wearing his favorite light blue suit.<br> I arrived past midnight, found the house in a strange familiar clutter.<br> My sister, wakened from my knocking, asked what I was doing back home.<br> Shortly after, my father came out, a most welcome apparition.<br> He said he felt like he has gotten a second lease on life.<br> <font size="+7">71</font><br> There were a few more sundry medical endeavors.<br> A nightly school clinic I relieved my father from.<br> Another, a brief and fascinating understudy with a cosmetic surgeon, <br> cutting away, pulling back the the ravages of aging, <br> eyes, noses, boobs and wrinkled sagging bags, <br> fulfilling dreams with silicon implants, <br> feminizing males by subtractions and additions<br> I considered the specialty briefly.<br> Thought it could be a merging of medicine and art.<br> Egads! Glad a guardian angel intervened.<br> <font size="+7">72</font><br> In the next two years, it was in art that I became immersed with,<br> exploring different mediums: ceramics, fiberglass, woodcuts,<br> and a short and failed attempt at the potter's wheel.<br> I hang around an artist workship, fiddliing around with art forms<br> and flirting with Japayuki hostesses killing their daytime hours.<br> I entered a juried mixed-media competition, I won first prize in painting.<br> In another, with entrees untagged in a juried competition in ceramics,<br> I won Grand Prize, first prize and honorable mention.<br> <font size="+7">73</font><br> The Plaza Miranda bombing occurred in August 21, 1971.<br> 9 people were killed.<br> 8 of the 100 wounded were Liberal Party candidates for Senate.<br> Marcos blamed the leftists and suspended habeas corpus,<br> a suspicious overture in his march to martial law.<br> <font size="+7">74</font><br> After a possible medical opportunity in Nigeria failed to materialize.<br> American loomed large in the horizon.<br> America, destination of dreams and desperate economic diasporas.<br> For many doctors and nurses it was the inevitable destination, <br> doors wide open with unending opportunities for healthcare providers.<br> For many, it is not the easily accessible Eden.<br> For many, worth suffering the long wait, <br> from an immigration quota busting at the seams.<br> For others, the fast-track route via a tourist application, <br> replete with faked bank accounts and essential "i'm-coming-back" narratives.<br> And once there, dispersing and disappearing into the melting pot.<br> And as tourist visas expire, finding sanctuaries in Filipino enclaves, <br> as TNT(tago-nang-tago) visa-fugitives<br> seeking legitimacy through sponsorship, marriage or amnesty.<br> Then, and now, for many, it is the last Eden.<br> For the "haves," no place better<br> to anchor babies.</font><br> <font face="Arial"><font size="+7">75<br> </font>For me, the path was paved long ago, <br> the dream shaped by the years of Christian Brothers education.<br> A colonial curriculum that shielded my starved educable soul from things Filipino.<br> No me-tangere, no Filibusterismo.<br> skimming over a sterilized version of Philippine history<br> but indulging in western mythologies, rife with indians and cowboys,<br> Hiawatha, Daniel Boone, Bowie, the Alamo.<br> Their spirits awaiting me in the quintessence melting pot. <br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">76</font><br> I applied for an American tourist visa.<br> Not as a physician, which would have facilitated gaining entry through a medical working visa,<br> But I elected to be a tourist, to travel the great country, see the art.<br> I imagined an apprenticeship with an artist,<br> my creative soul filled with passion, romance and adventure.<br> The processing gentleman at the U.S. embasy said: <br> <strong>I don't believe you. I know you're not coming back.</strong><br> I said I would.<br> Grudglingly, he approved my tourist visa application. <br> <font size="+7">77</font><br> There was six pesos to a dollar.<br> A peso for a pack of Lucky Strikes.<br> The sexual revolution was a decade or two away.<br> Young males rabid with testosterone circled the red light districts at night.<br> Mabini, Pasay, the barbecue strips of Dewey Blvd.<br> Fifteen to twenty pesos paid for a prostitute.<br> Short-time motel rooms were P19.50. <br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">78</font><br> November 1972, I left for America. <br> With about fifteen hundred dollars funding my pocketful of dreams. <br> My parents brought me to the airport.<br> My mother's parting words: <strong>You can come back anytime.</strong><br> My father's parting words: <strong>If I die, don't come back. Just say a prayer for me.</strong><br> Yeah. . . the grand opposites of parental angst and DNA.<br> <font size="+7">79</font><br> I landed in San Francisco, cabbed to Mill Valley.<br> My first few weeks were in a one-room pad, courtesy of a Pete O., <br> an American returning the courtesy of hospitality given when he visited the Philippines.<br> Same night I arrived, he took me to some dimly lit and smoky place,<br> inserted ourselves into a circle of people where a joint was being passed around,<br> and got my first American buzz. A good one.<br> A few nights later, his girlfriend's daughter comes to me, naked from the waist up,<br> asking for a light for her mom's cigarette, dangling from her lips,<br> her mortal sin-inducing nubile breasts<br> reflecting the dance of the flickering glow from a Bic's conspiratorial flame.<br> Wow! Jiminy crickets! This is America?<br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">80</font><br> I met L. a few years earlier in the Philippines, <br> the last year of my medical school; the last year of her BS studies.<br> The relationship was fueled by unrelenting passions in the landscape of love.<br> We looked forward to meeting up in the west coast.<br> She left for California a few months earlier and met me in Mill Valley.<br> Most in her family didn't like me.<br> It didn't seem to anyone that I would amount to anything.<br> She was young, the youngest in a family, needing to be protected<br> from all the things they saw or didn't see in me.<br> Later, she confessed, her family conspired to break us apart.<br> And so in LA, the earlier promise of love and life floundered and failed.<br> Too soon, forlorn and heartbroken, I was flying to Jersey.<br> <font size="+7">81</font><br> My journey for art was long on adventure, low on wisdom, and short on finance.<br> My move to New Jersey severely dwindled my dollar stash, <br> my continued survival through winter, by the grace of a cousin.<br> By February, my bankroll was down to a fistful of dollars.<br> Returning to the Philippines was one of two options.<br> Medicine was the other one.<br> I interviewed for an internship at a general hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey<br> and then and there, offered a position for a rotating intership to start in July.<br> Soon, my years of underachievement would expose me.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">82</font><br> There were still four months to internship and there was a large and gaping hole in my pocket.<br> I was a charity-case free-loading on a cousin.<br> Through a cousin's friend, Ed, I got an under-the-table employment in a small-boat company,<br> squeegeeing noxious polymer liquid on sheets of fiberglass.<br> It was a disparate crew made up of an assortment of social pathologies.<br> Ed was an ex-convict who had trouble getting it up.<br> A married co-worker had the hots for him, and kept making unrequited advances,<br> unware that he couldn't get it up or maintain a functional tumescence.<br> Another, an unmarried fat forty year-old Italian who lived with his mother<br> who packed him a five-course daily lunch.<br> Another guy who barely spoke a word the whole day,<br> and when he did, only to mumble to himself .<br> And me. . . qualifiably socially dysfunctional on any day of reckoning,<br> finally, for the first time in my life, in all and any measure, <br> feeling superiorly the most normal of the group,<br> Once a week, everyone would take a break from the squeegee<br> and rotate on a day of janitorial duty.<br> Ed knew I was a doctor and offered to do my janitorial rotation, an offer I declined.<br> I was paid $1.90 an hour, took home 90 dollars and change on Saturdays.<br> It paid for weekend beer at a local bar and a few games at the pool table.<br> <font size="+7">83</font></font> <font face="Arial"><br> July, I embarked on a journey of Medicine.<br> I had no idea at that time where it would take me.<br> Or that It would be a voyage that would take the next thirty years, and more.<br> But first, my years of academic underachievement would expose my dreadful deficiencies.<br> <font size="+7">84</font></font><font face="Arial"><br> <strong>On September 21, 1972, Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines.<br> </strong><font size="+7">85</font><br> Middlesex General Hospital was an accredited teaching hospital.<br> Like many of such, it attracted applicants from a motley of nationalities.<br> My group consisted of an Egyptian, a few Chinese, a Czech, many from India, and myself, the sole Filipino.<br> I was the weakest in the group. Well, maybe, except maybe for the Czech <br> who went through her internship with a dictionary in hand.<br> I did not have any interim hospital residency after graduation<br> and was unfamiliar and myself with the necessary skills essential for hospital medicine.<br> And although I could wing through with the basics,<br> the theory part was glaringly deficient, my clinical skills, woefully inefficient.<br> An initiation into Western medicine, It was a year of humbling experiences.<br> I was extremely fortunate to have been taken under the wing of an Indian resident, Dr Subaya,<br> who must have seen in me some kind of promise, who gave me the time and patience<br> during my rotation in internal medicine, and guided me in the techniques of procedures and biopsies<br> Still, there was too much to learn, too much to digest.<br> Although I was hungry to learn, there wasn't urgency and structure to the learning.<br> And, Internal medicine still had not caught my fancy.<br> I applied for a residency in Pathology in a New York hospital.<br> After the interview, assured of a position, I was taken around and shown<br> what the bulk of my first year's residency work would be.<br> Measuring and dictating notes on aborted fetuses.<br> It would fill the next few weeks of sleep with nightmares.<br> I backed out of the residency.<br> By then, it was too late to apply for an internal medicine residency in my hospital of internship.<br> All the residency positions were taken,<br> and also, the Chief of Medicine did not think I had the skills to teach incoming interns.<br> He offered me a another year of internship which he assured me would count<br> as another year for the three years required for an Internal Medicine residency.<br> Of course, I declined.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">86</font></font> <font face="Arial"><br> The year of internship was dog-eared with some memorable days and events.<br> In a ceramic art show, I entered a smaller version of the "Last Supper" piece<br> that won the grand prize a year and a half ago at the ceramic show in Manila.<br> Again, It won Grand Prize again, with a trophy to boot.<br> Another piece, "The Metamorphosis of Judas" won third prize.<br> There were other art shows, hauling artwork to boardwalks and weekend art fairs, <br> often coming home with "ribbon" prizes.<br> <font size="+7">87</font><br> Christmas eve, with nowhere to go, four of the interns decided to come to my place.<br> After our hospital day's work, we hurried to grocery shop for our night's feast.<br> All the stores were closed.<br> They still came to my one room apartment.<br> Furnished with a bean bag chair, flea market cushions and table<br> and feasted on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, <br> an assortment of snacks, washed down with Coca-Cola,<br> while we exchanged stories of motherlands.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">88</font><br> Mr. Fish was a cardiac patient who took a liking for me.<br> During his recurrent admissions, I spent much time with him, exchanging stories.<br> One quiet night of call, I made a pencil portrait sketch and gifted it.<br> He invited me to his house for dinner.<br> Tried to fix me up with the pretty nurses.<br> One weekend, he was admitted in cardiac arrest.<br> The resuscitation effort was only successful in bringing back a heart beat.<br> But there were all the other signs of irreversible brain damage,<br> fixed and dilated pupils, his vital signs maintained<br> by mechanical ventilation and a curtain intravenous lines.<br> I asked the nurse why he was being kept alive.<br> She said: The doctor doesn't want to turn it off. . . yet.<br> I turned the respirator off. His vital signs petered away.<br> I declared him dead. And went to talk to the family.<br> I never received any censure.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">89</font><br> And, there was. . . sex, drugs and rock n'roll. <br> Well. . . sex and drugs. No rock n' roll.<br> My music was acoustic guitar. Classic pieces. <br> More Bach minuets and bourrees than Beetles and BeeGees.<br> I hang on to folk music, although it was dying off the landscape.<br> But still, the acoustic music provided background to many nights<br> of alcohol fueled and smoky extended realities.<br> This was the early seventies. Although there was acid, marijuana was the social bridge.<br> Occasionally, one chanced into Thai sticks, skewered premium buds of seedless marijuana.<br> Alas, I don't think I looked like a dope-head.<br> But a joint materialized in near every social encounter.<br> Well, the long hair, artist, guitar-playing persona surely didn't help.<br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">90</font><br> And, there was sex.<br> More than any other immigrant population, <br> for that matter, perhaps, more than any other profession, the physician gets laid the most.<br> The medical profession has a singular allure<br> with their nurses, secretaries, ward clerks, <br> suffering boredom, loneliness and the vicissitudes of family life<br> finding sanctuary and respite in the intimate environs of clinics and hospitals<br> many playing confusing and interchangeable roles of prey and predator,<br> and the noblest of profession with his noble hard-on gets his ample noble share.<br> <font size="+7">91</font><br> During my internship, I met C., a Flemington Jersey lass.<br> I thought it was the "cosmic" thing.<br> She was Episcopalian.<br> I was Catholic.<br> We decided to get married in a park.<br> The minister said, No, it has to be in church, the House of God.<br> I dug into my cathechismal bag and countered:<br> <em><strong>God is everywhere!</strong></em> and said if he refused I would seek another pastor.<br> He agreed, but with a compromise. Instead of a park,<br> the wedding was held in my in-laws' backyard,<br> under an oak tree, with a yellow ribbon tied around it.<br> The minister delivered an ill-omened ill-timed homily on divorce and the fragility of relationships.<br> probably upset he couldn't get me inside God's house.<br> The sermon upset me none, I was high as a kite with a New Jersey buzz.<br> <font size="+7">92</font><br> With no available residency in an Internal Medicine teaching program, <br> and the lean pickings for alternative residencies in late June, <br> a house staff position in a non-teaching hospital moved us to Baltimore, Maryland.<br> Everything fit in a pint-sized U-Haul –<br> generic pieces of furniture, bed, pillow-couch, dining table,<br> kitchen necessities, boxes of books, a guitar,<br> and schnookel, a three-month old schnauzer</font><font face="Arial"> </font><font face="Arial">C. definitely had to have.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">93</font><br> Schnookel's name, I think, derives from a German word meaning 'sweetheart.' <br> From a country with a penchant for eating dogs, rather than as house pets,<br> I was indifferent to her cropped wiry coat and weird muzzle whiskered cuteness,<br> at the same time, incredulous at the 30-some dollars spent monthly<br> to trrim her coat and whisker.<br> Small cost for the guilt that came from her daily abandonment.<br> We'd come home to find the furniture legs, slippers, shoes,<br> carpet corners, pillows, in increasing degrees of all-chewed-up.<br> Belong to the old school of punishment-for-character-development<br> there were varying measures of doggie-corporeal punishment<br> which she seemed to accept with doggie-equanimity.<br> I tried to teach her dog tricks, to kneel, roll over,<br> shake hands and beg, and learned none of it.<br> What she leaned, from god knows where, was to hump my leg.<br> Coming home, dog-tired from long days of hospital work,<br> she'd come rushing to meet me, in frenzied delight<br> humping hard at my shin bone, to C's dismay and my perverse delight.</font><br> <font color="#000000" size="+7" face="Arial">94</font><font face="Arial"><br> Provident Hospital was a non-teaching hospital at the edge of Baltimore City.<br> The patients, the nurses and support staff were mostly black.<br> A few of the attending physicians were black,<br> the rest of the medical staff were mostly of immigrant roots.<br> The house staff were a motley group of interns or residents,<br> two Filipinos, a Spaniard, a Korean, and a Thai.<br> It was a half-way house for rejects,<br> residents who missed out on placement to teaching hospitals.<br> I took it as an opportunity for a re-education into Medicine.<br> <font size="+7">95</font><br> For the next six months, I embarked on a crash course in medicine. <br> I pored on tomes of books, read and re-read, day and night, <br> and read again on the diagnoses of every patient i was involved with.<br> In the cardiac/intensive care unit, I asked the nurses for help,<br> who more than willingly guided me through an on-site ABC of acute care.<br> I bought a book in electrocardiography, studied the electrical basis of rhythms and patterns.<br> I honed my auscultatiion skills, listened to tapes of cardiac murmurs and sounds.<br> It was the beginning of a fascinating journey.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">96</font><br> Surgery is a consequence of polished dexterity, a mastery of technique.<br> Specialty medicine limits expertise to a chosen field. <br> The heart, the endocrine system, the gastrointerestinal, hematology, the nervous system.<br> Ear nose throat. Oh. . . there's skin. . . cushy dermatology.<br> None of them took my interest.<br> It was "Internal Medicine" that drew me in, <br> its layers of seeming complexity, that often unfolds into simplicity,<br> a slowly increasing fascination that marched into a realization and epiphany<br> and into mawkish hubris, believing that more than any branch of medicine, it is internal medicine,<br> practiced to craft and commitment, that brings one closest to the human condition.<br> I called it many names: Blood-and-guts medicine. Gateway medicine. <br> Sherlock Holmes medicine. Connect-the-dots medicine.<br> Slowly and irrevocably, it would bring me to the altar steps<br> of the fascinating and endlessly challenging world of internal medicine.<br> <font size="+7">97</font><br> Barely four months in Provident Hospital, deep in my effort of re-education, <br> the Chief of Internal Medicine, a Thai immigrant, took me aside <br> and told me I was wasting my time there and should finish my residency.<br> He heard of a new residency program in Internal Medicine<br> and made me an appointment to interview for a residency position.<br> I was interviewed by the Chiefs of Medicine, Infectious Disease and Nephrology.<br> The muses or gods must have intervened.<br> All the questions asked were on topics I have read over the past two or three days.<br> I looked at it as more luck than erudition.<br> The Chief of ID asked why I wasn't on a residency program, <br> and added: <strong>What a loss that I was not taken by the last program.</strong><br> I was allowed to break my contract with Provident Hospital.<br> January, I started on my Internal Medicine residency in Franklin Square Hospital in Baltimore County.<br> <font size="+7">98</font><br> It was a whirlwind year.<br> The fascination with medicine grew.<br> The residency program was new.<br> The interns and residents in internal medicine was a motley crew of cultural diversity.<br> A rainbow coalition, from India, Pakistan, Burma, Bangladesh and the Philippines.<br> There were Americans rotating through Medicine from the Family Practice program.<br> A bright group, and despite occasional doses of intrigue and short-lived animosities,<br> there was a warm camaraderie that provided an exciting environ for learning.<br> And a cultural diversity that also manifested in the inevitable social evenings of feasting tables<br> that surprised our appetites with the adventures and assaults of spices and <br> invariably mouth-numbing fire-breathing concoctions. <br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">99</font><br> It was a great time for relearning and improving skills.<br> It was a time before the age of increasing reliance in technology and laboratory,<br> before the deluge of expensive diagnosing armamentaria of modern medicine.<br> Despite my years of underachievement in medical school, <br> the basics in the art of auscultation stuck.<br> And in internal medicine, the stethoscope is the indispensable instrument. <br> amplifying the inner human sounds<br> of bruits, gallops, murmurs, rhythms, snaps, rales and crepitations,<br> that can provide critical clues for diagnosis and treatment<br> or the absence of sounds that provide equally important clues.<br> I enjoyed the diagnostic challenges, <br> practiced the magic of the oft-neglected art of history taking,<br> clues spilling out from the layers of questions,<br> examining the patient, listening to sounds, laying hands, <br> reconciling the laboratory data, then. . . connecting the dots,<br> the wonderful eurekas at arriving at the correct diagnosis <br> and sometimes, the humbling ocassions of missing it.<br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">100</font><font size="+7"><br> </font>On emergency room duty, a forty-some year old female was brought in for chest pains.<br> By the time I saw her, after a GI antacid cocktail given by the nurse, the pain has almost resolved<br> The history revealed nothing to suggest a cardiac problem, no family history, no lifestyle risks.<br> A system review suggested acid-reflux problems.<br> Her electrocardiogram was normal. <br> Her physical exam, except for minimal epigastric tenderness, was unremarkable.<br> This was the time before the availabity of cardiac enzymes for emergency room screening. <br> She was sent home, pain-free and reassured.<br> Four hours later she was brought back to the emergency room in cardiac arrest.<br> Resuscitation efforts, which I led, failed.<br> For days I was paralyzed, incredulous, burdened by uncertainty.<br> I consulted on it, played it again and again in my mind, <br> agonizingly searched for the error or clinical misjudgment.<br> And found none.<br> I considered a safer specialty. Dermatology flirted with me. <br> But stayed in internal medicine.<br> The death was an early lesson. That stayed with me. <br> <font size="+7">101</font><br> A crossroad, pondering and reflecting, burdened by a realization<br> that no matter the science, no matter the thoroughness and commitment,<br> I will be brought back to this crossroad, again and again.<br> To ponder a death, to ponder what omission,<br> To ponder what else could have been done.<br> Or, to ponder what you should not have been done.<br> Centuries ago, Ambroise Paré phrased the motto:<br> "Guérir quelquefois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours"<br> To cure occasionally, relieve often, console always." <br> Only in the absolute commitment to that can we justify and comfort ourselves<br> In the occasionnal and inevitable deaths that surprise us.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">102</font><br> A Jewish couple came to dinner, the guy a resident at the hospital.<br> They brought a bottle of red wine, a departure from the beer and Tanduay of the Philippine days.<br> This was my first taste into the civilized world of grapey libation.<br> I found it unpleasantly tannic and warm. <br> I put a couple of ice cubes in it.<br> My proletarian ways were exposed<br> and ended future social interactions with the couple.<br> <font size="+7">103</font><br> By mid year, my marriage was floundering.<br> Medicine consumed my hours. Her studies consumed hers.<br> She wanted to find herself.<br> It was that time when "searching for oneself" was de rigueur.<br> She also wanted to try modeling in New York.<br> I told her she was too short.<br> She left anyway.<br> It broke my heart.<br> And she took Schnookel and her humpin'-doggin' ways with her.<br> <font size="+7">104</font><br> A different kind of crossroad.<br> I wanted to leave. <br> Start anew. Someplace. Any place. Even, back home.<br> I sold my artwork for a plane ticket and extra cash.<br> Soon, I packed my bags.<br> Ken L., the Chief of Medicine came to my place,<br> I imagine, to rescue me from my decision. .<br> We talked, idle chatter. I played guitar. We had a few gin and tonics.<br> Offered me a place, a room, in his home,<br> to crash, to put the pieces together, to chill.<br> I didn't take him up on the offer.<br> But it was an act of kindness and concern I have never forgotten.<br> I stayed on.<br> More than twenty years later, I thanked him for that act of kindness,<br> how the evening made me change my mind about leaving.<br> I choked on my words. <br> We hugged. For me, pleasantly cathartic.<br> <font size="+7">105</font><br> On my second year, I was offered the Chief Resident position.<br> A validating vote of confidence.<br> It was an incredible year of learning and teaching <br> and gaining hands-on experience on bedside procedures.<br> The climactic personal event was being asked to insert an emergency temporary pacemaker<br> on a myocardial infarction patient going into varying degrees of heart block.<br> There were no cardiologists immediately available.<br> It was me, threading wires through a subclavian stick, and a cardiac-PA providing guidance.<br> For someone who could have been measuring aborted fetuses,<br> it was a personally defining moment.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">106</font><br> I met B. A lass from the farmlands of the Midwest with great strong farm legs.<br> A chance elevator encounter and weeks of corridor flirting led to an 8-year relationship.<br> She left her husband of six months.<br> "All is fair in love and war."<br> She said he said I was a gook.<br> It was a first-time word that required a dictionary check.<br> Said she frequently dreamt of having a Korean lover.<br> I guess gooks all look alike in the ethereal haziness of dreams.<br> She became the alter ego.<br> We shared in music. My guitar, Her flute. We sang together.<br> She was country music crazy. Late seventies. Early eighties. <br> Don Williams, Merle Haggard. Willie Nelson.<br> And their loves songs that continue to break my heart to this day.<br> Oh. . did I mention she had great healthy looking gams, thighs, goobers and butt?<br> In her tight jeans, black men would just gawk and ogle, <br> shake their heads and say <strong>Oh, Sweet Jesus!</strong><br> And she loved her dope, marijuana mostly.<br> She half-filled cigarettes with grass and repacked them, perfectly.<br> And loved lacing her cookies with it.<br> We were high on the Swiss alps, munching on Maryland-baked cookies and brownies.<br> That was the time before airport dogs.<br> Later, she invented a smokie surf-and-turf. <br> Days of reckless anomie.<br> Days long gone.<br> <font size="+7">107</font><br> A few months left of the chief residency year, I was granted an unheard-of privelege<br> and allowed to take a part-time job <br> at the Maryland House of Correction, a maximum security prison in Jessup.<br> There was an hour and a half of Monday-to-Friday morning clinics,<br> for which I had to rush out of Franklin Square after morning rounds .<br> Massive metal sliding doors welcoming you, opening and claning shut,<br> walking through a gauntlet of men in the fringe of existence, in their silent honesty of failures <br> hardened criminals, recidivists, murderers, rapists, perverts and pedophiles<br> and the so-many who claim their innocence.<br> The first duty is visit the "Hole," a dungeon relic of the Dark Ages, <br> down a long flight of steps to a few rooms in the dark and dank, <br> where we might find a recalcitrant soul, half-naked or shivering in his shield of blanket.<br> Next, to attend to any claims of anal rape <br> and the unpleasant task of confirming it with rectal swabs and smears.<br> Then to two Segragation Halls, fifty cells each.<br> Each cell as wide as the arms' stretch in a yawn,<br> their days scratched on to the walls,<br> some walls pasted with pages of naked women,<br> torn from the magazines of shared and silent surrogates.<br> Then to Lock-Up, where some prisoners are punitively placed in isolation,<br> or where some request self-imposed protective isolation.<br> <font size="+7">108</font><br> I walked the line of cells, from end to end, listening to the litany of human misery, <br> their maladies, real and invented, and their ephemeral needs.<br> The first days my hands shook so hard I had to hook my fingers onto the door bars<br> to steady my hands as I held and wrote on the chart.<br> The guard escort warned me many times: <strong>Don't stay too close, Doc.<br> They have splashed buckets of shit and urine on some of the doctors.<br> </strong>I heard quite a number of doctors lasted only a week or less.<br> A few, just a day.<br> And, I never got splashed on.<br> After a few weeks, their greetings became cordial.<br> <strong>Good morning, Dr. Sharp.<br> </strong>I always wore a suit. They loved my threads.<br> But I was still terribly bullied by my fears. <br> In the clinics, I had to learn the language of their complaints, the real and the feigned,<br> the bartering and the pacts, the culture and trade of the drugs.<br> Everyone was testing the new doctor.<br> Everyone wanted drugs: pain killers, sleeping pills, nerve busters,<br> or for that matter, any medication with trade-in value.<br> Many of the maladies are feigned and the drugs find their way into the local drug trade. <br> <strong>Doc, those motherfucking pills don't do the job.<br> Doc, some motherfucker stole my pills.<br> Doc, I get these motherfucking headaches.</strong><br> There was no science in the medicine.<br> But there was skill and art in the pacts.<br> <strong>Doc, my motherfucking nerves are acting up.</strong> <br> Here comes the Equanil line. <br> They liked their Darvons, Valiums, Soma.<br> They liked anything they can shoot, through the arms, throught the nose, through the toes.<br> They liked anything they can trade or sell.<br> Five for a Valium, three for a Soma, a dollar for a Darvon.<br> Two packs of cigarettes for an Equanil.<br> They play poker or Jacks, betting and bidding on pills and capsules.<br> If I scrimp on writing prescriptions, they'll bug the motherfucking bejesus out of me<br> and sign up for clinic visits two or three times every motherfucking week.<br> The other doctor, a few months ahead in the trenches, advised me:<br> <strong>You gotta stay tough.</strong><br> So I gave <em>tough</em> a try.<br> Started talking talking their mother-fucker embellished language.<br> The first time I used "motherfucker," it turned heads around.<br> <strong>Ok, I'll give enough pills to last the fucking month, <br> but I don't want to see you for a mother-fucking month.</strong> <br> They'd say: <strong>Deal, Doc. </strong> Or, <strong>Word.</strong><br> Soon enough, my hands weren't shaking anymore, and I could look them in the motherfucking eye.<br> And I don't see them for a month.<br> When it came to pill pacts, they were always true to their motherfucking words.<br> <font size="+7">109</font><br> In elementary school, when my mother heard me cursing <em>putang ina</em>, she soaped my mouth.<br> Alas, my short stint as a prison doctor left me permanently afflicted with a motherfucking penchant for cussing.<br> A malady so severe, my mother would have suffered elbow tendinitis soaping the curses off my mouth.<br> <font color="#0000FF" size="+7">110</font><br> There was a prison hospital. It was mostly empty, except for a chronic patient or two.<br> One was an elderly man, who has been in prison most of his adult life.<br> He had nowhere to go to. No family. No home. No children who cared or visited.<br> Maladies were invented for him that justifed chronic use of the hospital ward<br> in exchange for the cleaning and janitorial services he gladly performed.<br> This and other small favors I did for the inmates did not go unnoticed.<br> Soon, my clinic patients were being screened by inmate bosses, <br> abusers and trouble makers kept away.<br> One time I was warned: <strong>Monday, don't come to work, there will be a small riot. </strong><br> And true enough, there was.<br> <font size="+7">105</font><br> Before residency ended, I had three offers to join in private practice.<br> The second, with too much baggage of censure, I turned down outright.<br> Another was appealing, but was asking me to cut my hair short.<br> So I walked away from that.<br> But many years later, a photo relic showed what I was being asked to cut off.<br> Lordy, lordy, lordy. I was still fashioning my motherfucking Mod-Squad afro-type hairdo.<br> I asked everyone why no one told me it looked so anachronistically motherfucking silly.<br> I took the first offer, joined a guy who expressed interest during my early residency days<br> and saw in medicine the potential of realizing his vision and version of power and politics.<br> We formed the base for what would grow into a successful enterprise,<br> for a while, a brotherhood of men immersed in the humanity of their profession,<br> becoming one of the busiest and more successful private practices<br> in the Rosedale part of Baltimore County.<br> <font size="+7">106</font><br> The practice grew from two to five physicians, adding another physician, each year or two,<br> becoming a multispecialty group with a cardiologist, an oncologist, <br> a pulmonologist, and a gastroenterologist.<br> I was the basic internist.<br> From the start, I begged off committee appointments, medical politics and socializations.<br> Although there was a busy clinic practice, the bulk of the work was hospital practice,<br> many of the patients referred by local practitioners for hospital admission <br> and management of acute life-threatening problems.<br> Almost always there was a handful of patients in the cardiac and intensive care units.<br> It was a time before the hospitalists became in vogue.<br> At the peak of the practice, we averaged about 60 patients in the three hospitals we rounded.<br> Weekends, the partners take off, the on-call worked it alone –<br> the patient rounds, new admissions, phone calls from patients and families, <br> from sunrise to way past sundown, often to the midnight hours.<br> Tired to the bone, you crawl to bed.<br> Some nights, you get called back to the hospital, a heart attack, <br> a patient taking a turn for the worse, an imminent death.<br> you drag your weary bones, crawling out of bed.<br> <font size="+7">107</font><br> We worked our butts off, rewarded by proceeds of the pie divided in five equal parts.<br> Halcyon days of medical commerce that allowed the good life<br> with frequent respites and travels, to return refreshed and replenished.<br> Still, we joked about the math and economics of our profession,<br> earning much less than half in a month<br> of what some baseball players would make in a single at-bat.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">108</font><br> The group was a rainbow coalition of minorities, but far from disadvantaged.<br> From the Dominican Republic, Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and a Jewish physician.<br> A paella of unusual names.<br> But none like the etymological conundrum mine presented.<br> I should have printed out a small hand-out card with my name's roots and historical apocrypha.<br> A Spanish first name. Godofredo. That means "friend of God."<br> "U" is from my mother's maiden name: Umali. Pure Tagalog.<br> Stuart. Traced back to one who came with the short-lived British occupation of the 1670s.<br> Could have been an officer from the royal family of the Stuarts,<br> said to have saved a local damsel in distress, whom he eventually married and propagated.<br> <font size="+7">109</font><br> It's the Godofredo part of the name that is the recurrent problem.<br> Too frequent, a cause of misspelling; and sometimes, a misattribution.<br> Once, I advised a daughter on her mother's diagnosis of metastatic cancer<br> carefully treading and explaining the options for supportive and palliative care<br> and the withdrawal of life-extending measure.<br> She screamed a long stretch of invectives.<br> <strong>God! I know you have 'god' in your name.<br> But you're not God! How dare you decide my mother's life!</strong><br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">110</font><br> The guitar was never idle. It stood against the wall<br> always ready to provide therapeutic doses of sound.<br> A repertoire of classic pieces, practiced to reasonable perfection.<br> And the songs, mostly folk and 80s country and ballads, <br> more often singing of love found or pining of love lost.<br> I was asked to perform for weddings of nurses and residents.<br> A few years of this musical avocation, the chief of Family Medicine told me<br> <strong>Perhaps, you should stop singing for the residents' weddings,<br> they separate within a year.</strong><br> <font size="+7">111</font><br> Guérir quelquefois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours.. <br> To cure occasionally, relieve often, console always. <br> Both tenet and maxim, it guides many in their practice of medicine.<br> And good medicine demands work and sacrifice,<br> way beyond the three A's that I was mentored with early on.<br> Ability, availability and amiability.<br> But I have seen some successful practices run on just two A's or less.<br> balanced up by an indefinable ingredient of "style" or "quality"<br> that cements a bond of trust and loyalty.<br> I have covered physicians' practices during their vacation or illness absences,<br> or took care of their patients during their hospital admissions,<br> and listened to them talk of their physicians in awe.<br> while reading through the charts or listening to their histories<br> that exposes a dreadful level of negligent care.<br> But some practitioners are blessed with accidental humanity<br> practicing their profession with caring and compassion, <br> with doses of consoling words or comforting touches<br> always dispensed in unhurried time<br> that more than make up for their negligence, ommisions and ignorance.<br> Medicine is both science and art, sometimes more of the latter,<br> reliant on pharmaceuticals, tincture of time, faith and placebo. . . and luck.<br> <font size="+7">112</font><br> They come to us, not just for the cure and the comforting.<br> The come to us with their hopes and fears, <br> ready to bare their souls, if we have the time to care,<br> with many stories they want to tell, if we have time to listen.<br> And if we care and listen, we will often be burdened with a little more sadness.<br> Often the stories are windows to their illness <br> or doors they allow you to enter into rooms filled with their dreadful little secrets<br> that might explain the whence of their sundry complaints<br> You try to fit that all in a 20- or 30-minute visit.<br> It is impossible to do that in the 15-minute visit alloted<br> by managed care's ka-ching-ka-ching kind of jiffy-lube medicine. <br> <font size="+7">113</font><br> I became the "astute" clinician, a reference that embarassed me,<br> as well as the other words of approval and sometime outright praise.<br> that always managed to leave me tongue-tied and uncomfortable,<br> in awe as i was of the brilliance of the many physicians around me.<br> I felt mine was a simple system of hard work, situational reading<br> learning the art of the history taking<br> and blessed with an ability to connect the dots.<br> <font size="+7">114</font><br> There were many humbling moments.<br> Times when the dots won't connect.<br> Or times where there were no dots to connect.<br> Dr. S called: <strong>I need help on this patient.<br> She keeps telling me she's going to die.</strong><br> <strong>The tests I've done are all normal.<br> Please put her in the hospital, run her through some tests to reassure her.</strong><br> She was a woman in her mid thirties.<br> Healthy, with no significant past history, a non-contributory family history.<br> And a physical exam that yielded nothing of concern.<br> She told me:<strong> I am going to die.</strong><br> It was a friday.<br> Her admission tests, xrays, labs and ekg were all normal.<br> I informed her of the results, trying to insert reassurances into her premonition of death.<br> I figured on keeping her over the weekend, and discharging her monday.<br> Sunday night she was found dead during the nurse's routine vital signs rounds.<br> An autopsy was done.<br> During the interminable wait I pondered on what I missed.<br> What pathology would be revealed at postmortem.<br> It revealed nothing.<br> Forewarned, yet unpreventable.<br> An inexplicable death.<br> <font size="+7">115</font><br> Deaths hover our days of work, familiar, often predictable,<br> a welcome end to a painful and protracted struggle.<br> When all else have failed, we must guide them into that end.<br> The dignified death, unfamiliar to many,<br> who choose instead to wage a hopeless effort to extend life.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">116<br> </font><font face="Arial">There</font> are deaths that come with suddenness.<br> A patient is brought lifeless into the emergency room.<br> Or found unresponsive in the ward.<br> The paging operator calling a Dr Blue or Code Blue.<br> There is a hurry-scurry of activity <br> doctors and nurses taking pause, then responding,<br> the crash-cart rolling down the corridors<br> all rushing and congregating to the 'code.'<br> A lead doctor conducts the CPR<br> goes through an ABCD of resuscitation<br> orchestrating the chaotic beside activity<br> of doctors, nurses, respiratory techs with their assigned chores.<font face="Arial"><br> intubating, bagging, compressing, frantically searching for veins.<br> Reading the streaming EKG and calling out the directions.<br> Pump. Flat line. Shock. Lidocaine. Bicarb. Calcium.<br> Bolus. Shock. Pump. Lab. Gases. Pump.<br> Sinus rhythm. Pulse check. Blood pressure.<br> Sometimes you quit. Note the time. Pronounce the patient dead.<br> As often, you bring them back.<br> Eventually the procedure becomes routine.<br> A drama of life and death.<br> The outcome never predictable.<br> And it never ceases to exhilarate.<br> More so when a patient tells you later,<br> <strong>Thanks. I was dead. I was watching everything from across the room.</strong></font><br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">117</font><br> Once, removed from the support personnel, it ceased to be routine.<br> A 40-some patient, visiting from Pennsylvania, <br> came to the clinic to consult on recent onset chest pains.<br> With the day's schedule slightly backed up, the tech decided do an EKG.<br> Unknown to him that the patient's clinical history was significant<br> and reading the EKG to be normal, he told him to do sit-ups.<br> After a minute or two, he started having chest pains, then collapsed.<br> The tech interrupted a patient's visit and told me:<br> <strong>A patient passed out in the EKG room.</strong><br> I came to a patient, not passed out, but lifeless and pulseless,<br> in full cardio-respiratory arrest.<br> No nurses, no support staff other than a tech who has just about lost it,<br> And a front-office staff who's expertise were insurance forms and billing,<br> unprepared and untrained for such emergent events,<br> running around in panicky circles in a circus of comic confusion.<br> <strong>Get the oxygen!</strong><br> <em>Where's the oxygen?</em><br> <em>Do we have oxygen?</em><br> <em>I've never seen oxygen.</em><br> A frenzied search for oxygen and a frantic call to 911.<br> The patient was lying on a high and narrow examining table.<br> I needed a stool for better compression leverage,<br> They couldn't find a stool. <br> I gave as strong a pound on his chest, climbed the table, <br> straddled him and started doing external cardiac compressions<br> while straining to read the streaming EKG printouts.<br> The oxygen tank was still missing. The tech did mouth-to-mouth.<br> By the time the emergency recue team arrived, <br> at about the same time the oxygen tank was located,<br> the patient had stabilized into a regular rhythm and vital signs.<br> He survived his heart attack.<br> My partner said his family called, effusive with praise and gratitude.<br> Like: <strong>You walk on water.</strong><br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">118</font><br> There were unpredictable visits from the demons of depression. <br> Or the more familiar demons of dark moods.<br> Often, the catalyst, some absurd and inane incident.<br> Almost always, benign, manageable, short-lived.<br> Growing up, the family made fun of it, that the moon was full,<br> the dogs would be howling, and soon I will be in my dark moods.<br> Always I attributed it to the benign madness that came with creativity.<br> Seasonal or recurrent disruptions of the delicate balance<br> between neurons, chemistry, synapses and electrical wiring, <br> and the million and one pieces of unpleasant memories that pushes at the surface,<br> overwhelming, possessing, controlling,<br> immobilized in some vast confusing emptiness.<br> Or as the Chinese see it, as imbalances of the energy meridians,<br> yin-and-yangy asymmetries.<br> <font size="+7">119</font><br> One time, the demon came with brutal vengeance.<br> Insiduously, it took form, gained a foothold.<br> A month into it, of inexplicable dark days and sleepness nights.<br> John Lennon was shot dead.<br> I nose-dived into a bottomless abyss.<br> Difficult to put in words.<br> An inexplicable emptiness.<br> A heavy nothingness.<br> An emotional blackhole.<br> Medical work kept me going, the malady undetected by people at work.<br> No patient died during that span <br> Moving, motion helped.<br> I would get on my car at four in the morning,<br> drive the beltway towards Washington, then back<br> as the sun was starting to rise.<br> B. was there. Suffered the long quiet months. Watched over me.<br> I flushed down everything that I could overdose on.<br> It was a long time before prozac.<br> It lasted a while, four, five months.<br> Spring came, it must have helped.<br> Unnoticeably, slowly, it lifted.<br> One day, I realized. . . I was feeling fine. Normal.<br> It was an inexplicably dark and torturous time.<br> Surviving it, I knew, if it would ever come back, I would survive it anew.<br> <font color="#0000FF" size="+7">120</font><br> My mother was diagnosed to have metastatic breast cancer. <br> Eighteen of 19 nodes were positive.<br> The surgeon made an estimation of six months.<br> She tried chemo but found the side effects of the first treatment intolerable.<br> She went the alternative routes: Laetrile, from apricot pits.<br> Vitamins and supplements. <br> Prayers.<br> A trip to Lourdes before heading for Baltimore.<br> The powers of prayers and placebo, faith and the fringe.<br> She survived another twenty years.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">121</font><br> My parents visited in the early 80s.<br> It was fall, the colors were changing.<br> My mother was almost blind.<br> We drove through autumnland.<br> Even interstate-95 was pretty. Then up to the Shenandoah Valley's skyline drive<br> to the West Virginia backroads, the colors ablaze.<br> They sat in the back, father excitedly describing the colors as we passed them by.<br> The yellows and reds, the pink and oranges.<br> I stole rearview mirror glances at my mother<br> who sat straight, her eyes closed, with a smile on her face.<br> Later, recalling the highlights of their vacation,<br> she said the drive through autumnland was one of her favorite parts of the travel.<br> <font size="+7">123</font><br> B. took regular breaks to visit her folks.<br> Returning from one of those visits, she told me she was leaving me.<br> She ran into her high school sweetheart who offered her things I couldn't.<br> She left in 83. In the midst of one of the heaviest snowstorms in Maryland.<br> On a February, a day before Valentine's, I think.<br> I remember the goodbyes, in the airport waiting lounge.<br> I could hear my heart breaking, watching her walk away, the doors closing behind her.<br> There are some country songs that sing of such a time.<br> Of love ending.<br> Of love walking away.<br> Of pain, of emptiness.<br> Oh, sweet Jesus, how it broke my heart.<br> But. . . all's fair in love and war.<br> <font size="+7">124</font><br> <strong>A few months later, August 21, 1983, Ninoy Aquino was assassinated.</strong><br> I wrote a piece: Nasaan Ang Mga Bayani? Where are the Heroes.<br> I made a collage art work, with the same title.<br> <font size="+7">125</font><br> Iris was a next door neighbor, a sad woman, long afflicted by depression.<br> Plagued by demons that taunted her of dreadful failures of motherhood<br> and the failure of three previous attempts to end her life through drug overdoses.<br> She chastised me on the silver Corvette I bought when B. left.<br> She said it was a phallic expression, an obvious attempt at covering up a failed relationship. <br> Months later, she invited me for dinner.<br> I confess, I thought it an overture for romantic possibilities.<br> A scrumptious dinner and a bottle of red later,<br> she revealed the nature of her invite, saying:<br> <strong>I want you to help me kill myself.</strong><br> Cupid scampered away, laughing.<br> and I spent the rest of the evening exhorting with all the Hippocratic arguments I can manage.<br> Her depression was chronic, but succumbed to seasonal worsening in the winter months.<br> Antidepresssants barely smooth the ragged edges of her malady.<br> I offered and she agreed to a course acupuncture treatments, <br> hoping that a meridian balancing of energies might help.<br> She completed a course, and she said it helped.<br> Six months later, I ran into her in the grocery store,<br> exchanged pleasantries, asked how she was. . . <strong>fine</strong>. <br> Nothing revealed in her face.<br> A week later, she was dead.<br> She had bought a gun. . . and ate a bullet.<br> <font size="+7">126</font><br> 1983, I lucked into buying a shell of a brick townhouse in Fell's point,<br> a quaint and historic waterfront community, <br> beneficiary to the Baltimore Inner Harbor rennaissance<br> and one of its sanctuary neighborhoods of Baltimore<br> invisibly fenced and economically insulated from travails and maladies of inner city life.<br> It was early in its years of gentrification and upscaling, <br> homeless people littered the benches, panhandlers harrassed the pedestrians,<br> sleeping winos took their siestas in doorsteps. <br> They were part of its old world ambience, with its profusion of antique shops and craft stores<br> restaurants and dives, a sinful number of pubs and live music. <br> 1622 Thames Street was one of the oldest houses in Fell's point,<br> 160 years or older, crumbling brick works, leaky roofs, rat-infested.<br> With the help of friends, the inner shell was stripped and transformed <br> into a contemporary living space of wood, metal and drywall.<br> It was purchased for a fast-flip – to renovate and sell for a profit.<br> Instead it became home base for the next twenty years.<br> The first floor became the Thame Street Gallery which showed my artwork.<br> and provided that magic space where after work, shedding the physician's costume,<br> I became the artist, never tiring of the gallery talk, explaining the work,<br> and feeding off the visitors' accolade and appreciation for the art.<br> Nights, the town transformed, and as the early evening fine-dining crowds receded to suburbia,<br> the late evening Bawlamer locals materialize for their raucous bacchanalia.<br> The deepening night brings the barroom brawls, the sirens and paddywagons<br> with its decibels that crescendoed into the closing time hours.<br> The gallery usually stayed open late, an avid witness to the nightly street theater.<br> The goths in rebellious statement of black, sequined and pierced, hair dyed eerie shades.<br> The drug dealers and drug users and countless good-time seekers seeking to forget.<br> Some begged to use the gallery comfort room, pleading their urgent bladderful,<br> but ofen, more than a pee, also for a toke and a snort. <br> One time, I caught someone in the middle of doing an Eight-Ball.<br> Sometimes, they'd leave a joint or small plastic bags with leftover coke.<br> There were a few house calls made in ungodly hours of night or early mornings<br> for a few locals having adverse street-drug reactions. <br> Soon enough, my permissive ways created rumors of drug-dealing.<br> Sharing a common alley walkway with a drug-dealing neighbor didn't help.<br> Rumors spread that I was in cahoots with local drug dealers.<br> It took a month or two of fruitless surveillance by unmarked cars and undercover to pull away.<br> A "No Public Restroom" sign stopped the courtesy use of the gallery restroom.<br> It was an unusual stretch of time. <br> Of art. Music. Inner city life. An American street theater.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">127</font><br> Although long separated and divorced from C, I kept in touch with the in-laws.<br> I learned of their slowly failing healths from their daughter Kathy<br> and helped with the economics of their medical needs through pharmaceutical samples.<br> On one visits, I was surprised to find Schnookel with them.<br> She had gotten sickly, with gout and kidney problems.<br> Burdensome, she was given to them to care for.</font><br> I was doubly surprised how she remembered,<br> <font face="Arial">rushing to meet me, in frenzied delight<br> humping hard at my shin bone, to my perverse delight.<br> <font size="+7">128</font><br> In February 1986, I watch for days, mesmerized, gripped, shivering in elation,<br> unending television fragments of the unfolding of the Philippine people power revolution<br> fueled by years of festering anger and frustration against the Marcos regime.<br> Watched the tanks, the swelling masses of people, <br> the rapidly multiplying cast of characters, the circus of political defections.<br> the lumpenproletariat providing noise and number,<br> marching into the crescendo of that historic crossroad in EDSA. <br> Four days that galvanized the nation and transfixed the world. <br> The culmination of the rivalry between Marcos and Ninoy,<br> climaxing non-violently with the ouster of a dictator,<br> the end of his regime of oppression and terror. <br> Where are the heroes?<br> I watched them for days, the collective hero . . .the masa.<br> In the epilogue, everyone started dipping their fingers into the hero-bowl.<br> The high-end political defectors and military rebels – <strong>without us, it couldn't have happened</strong>.<br> The bourgeosie and power-elites – <strong>only because we allowed it to happen</strong>.<br> In the end, the miracle brokers won. <br> With nuns standing their grounds on advancing tanks, a Cardinal power-player, <br> the bloodless coup, and a populace steeped in religiosity,<br> it was no hard-sell. The Miracle of Edsa. <br> A few years later, they built the <a href="EdsaShrine.html">Edsa Shrine</a>.<br> <font size="+7">129</font><br> In 87, I received a third notice from immigration asking me to appliy for citizenship.<br> My immigrant status from fast-tracked by a marriage to a Jersey girl in 75 (That's a Tom Wait's song).<br> Despite two earlier invitations for citizenship application,<br> despite the travel benefits and conveniences,<br> foreign travel visa applications, and the disproportionately long lines for re-entry, <br> I held back for a long time, perhaps burdened by twisted romantic patriotic notions<br> that changing citizenship is a profoundly serious decision. <br> Even though many years ago, just a few years in America, in awe and accumulating wondernment, <br> I wrote a letter to my parents that in America I have found the country<br> with the spirit, ideals, passions, freedoms that I could embrace.<br> Take from and give to.<br> Sadly apologizing that I thinking of applying for U.S. citizenship.<br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">130</font><br> Finally, I went to the immigration office to file an application.<br> I was surprised when the officer dispatched me to an examiner for Q and A.<br> Usually, you were made to fill up an application and return for oral exam.<br> I expressed surprise and unpreparedness.<br> He smiled <strong>Go ahead. You'll do fine.</strong><br> I failed. Miserably. Shamefully.<br> Came back a few weeks later. Prepared to sing the Star-Spangled Banner accapela if I had to.<br> I aced it. No anthem needed.<br> Came back weeks later for the oath-taking.<br> And brought home the oath-taking flag as memento.<br> <font size="+7">131</font><br> I made a plaster sculpture of a stylized figure<br> looking out the art gallery window that opened to a pedestrian sidewalk.<br> It held the small oath-taking flag in its hand, fluttering in the wind.<br> One day, I looked up instinctively, alertedby the raucous sounds<br> of a inebriated young men who walked by.<br> The flag was gone.<br> I ran after a group of men disappearing around the corner.<br> Yelling to them, they stopped.<br> I demanded to have the flag back.<br> One of them uttered a group denial. <strong>We don't have it.</strong><br> <em>it was there. Now it's gone. One of you took it.</em><br> Second group denial:<strong> We don't have it.</strong><br> They were too big, too many, and too tipsy;<br> a situation with futility for civilized exchange of words.<br> Shaking my head, I walked away, quietly lamentaing the loss of my flag.<br> A minute later, one of them came back to the gallery <br> handed me the flag, saying <strong>I'm really sorry.</strong><br> <font size="+7">132</font><br> There was a restlessness that surfaced intermittently.<br> Medicine had long ago revealed a murky side.<br> Avarice cloaked in the profession's seeming noble humanity.<br> I saw histories and records tweaked,<br> bills cranked up with needless tests and procedures.<br> I sold out for a while, milking the medical cow.<br> In 88, I quit private practice.Took a sabbatical<br> Went back to the Philippines, built a house in Baguio.<br> Seduced by the idea of doing art full-time<br> I searched for my muse but all I found was a vacuum of creativity.<br> After six months, I returned to Baltimore. To Fell's Point.<br> <font size="+7">133</font><br> i was barely five when my grandfather died.<br> I remember the burial. The procession to the cemetery.<br> The white tomb, with its massive cross at one end.<br> The gaping opening at the unfinished end, <br> with the pile of adobe blocks that would seal the hole,<br> to finally wall off the dead in casketed repose.<br> I remember the tearful lacerating wailing of the women<br> as the coffin was being pushed into the dark of the <em>nicho,<br> </em>the swelling sound of sorrow as the opening diminished with each block <br> the cacophony of mournful sounds that lingered long after the last block.<br> The tearful and anguished ritual of final separation.<br> <font size="+7">134</font><br> My father died in 89. I didn't make it in time to say goodbye.<br> His death was not sudden, suffering a slow decline from heart failure<br> that long nibbled at his gregarious love of life.<br> After a heart attack more than 20 years before, he confronted his mortality<br> and mounted the exercise bike with great passion<br> so proud of how he turned his cholesterol numbers back.<br> On my last visit, looking back, there must have been a feeling it was our last time.<br> He was giving me some of his personal items, books.<br> Himself, a physician, he sensed from the recent years of declining health<br> his coming confrontation with his mortality.<br> His wish to be cremated was long ago decided.<br> His cremation, the first of many that would follow in the clan.<br> <font size="+7">135</font><br> Then, cremation was an uncommon event.<br> It hyperaccelerates the dust-unto-dust idiom of our mortality.<br> It subtracts from death, the rituals of grieving,<br> the long held traditions of religion,<br> the indigenous contributions of customs, myths and superstitions.<br> The coffin's glitz and glitter that measures social status.<br> The wake, the sorrow-filled faces paying their final respects, <br> in silent prayers while saying <strong>he looks so peaceful.</strong><br> The ephemeral garden of flowered condolences.<br> The tomb rituals.<br> In the province, there is the tupada, cockfights to raise money to help defray expenses.<br> Card games, <em>tong-its</em>, mahjong to add to the funereal coffers.<br> In the urban areas, unclaimed corpses are claimed to gain as permit <br> for a wake's duration of gambling.<br> The nine-day of prayers, punctuated by apatan (4th-day) and siyaman (9th-day)<br> The <em>tapusan, </em>30 days for women, 40 days for men. <br> A year later, the <em>babang luksa, </em>the final prayer event <br> when grieving is officially lifted, the black wardrobe retired.<br> Although many of these rituals persist,<br> cremation diminishes and dulls the grieving process.<br> <font size="+7">136</font><br> Father's body was taken to the crematorium.<br> The family was assembled in a room with a big glass window<br> the view opening to a space that connected to the crematory.<br> The gurney rolled in, my father still clothe in wake attire.<br> We were told polyester left a film of black soot.<br> My brother and I undressed him to his cotton underwear.<br> My mother stood by, blind but sensing, listening.<br> The crematory door opened and revealed an inner space littered with bone fragments.<br> The attendant shrugged, tried to say '<strong>that's the way it is</strong>.' <br> There's always leftover bones. Like table crumbs.<br> It was unimaginable and unacceptable mixing father's remains with others. <br> My brother asked him to sweep it clean, which he gladly did, <br> with the assurance of a tip for the extra broom-and-rake services.<br> The flat bed was separated from the gurney, pushed inside.<br> The window was filled with family, sibliings, children, waving goodbye.<br> There was sadness, some tears, but no wailing.<br> The door closed, the heat turned on.<br> While the chimney smoked, I searched for an urn.<br> While the family waited, exchanging stories of father, still unshared.<br> A few hours later, only bones remained, small and large fragments, in the outline of a body<br> broomed into a pile and placed on a bucket and poured into crushing machine<br> to grind to a homogeneous pebbles of osseous remains.<br> Then to a waiting marble urn, then back to the house.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">137</font><br> Alas, cremation would repeat itself, too many times.<br> In twelve years, there would be five deaths in the family, two unexpected.<br> The last two deaths did away with the traditional wakes<br> going straight to cremation, followed by nine days of ash-wake.<br> New rituals were formed, becoming familiar with each death.<br> While there might have been the initial wailing of grief,<br> there were no longer the mournful sounds of final separation.<br> Perhaps there is no final separation, taking the ashes home.<br> Perhaps, it is the accelerated ash-unto-ash return.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">138</font><br> I went back to medicine, in the managed-care setting, and stayed in it for the next 14 years,<br> working a part-time schedule, three to four days a weeks, <br> six months a year, three on, three off, or, six on, six off.<br> This time it with a clinic serving a patient population and culture I was unfamiliar with,<br> so unlike the Jewish communities of Reisterstown<br> or the blue-collar patient population of Rosedale.<br> This was in the inner city, the black community of East Baltimore,<br> itself polarized by shades of black - ebony black or high yellow.<br> Paralyzed by violence and a malignant drug culture<br> and by all the other measures of urban erosion –<br> ghetto communities, abandoned neighborhoods, boarded up tenement houses.<br> The sounds of sirens and the familiar popping of gunfire in the nights.<br> Drive-bys were common, punctuated by too many tragedies<br> of stray bullets or wrongfully targeted victims.<br> In too many streets, drugs were the inescapable day-to-day reality.<br> Everyone either bought or sold.<br> Its middle class have long ago trickled out to suburbia.<br> Of the underclass, many tried to leave, only a few could.<br> To nearby communities where they were resented and unwelcome.<br> To Virginia or North Carolina or wherever a relative might offer a place of sanctuary.<br> But for most, there is nowhere to go.<br> Most are born, live and die in Baltimore.<br> <font size="+7">139</font><br> For much of the twelve years, I worked in the inner city.<br> Lived blocks and an earshot away from its sounds, sirens and gunfire.<br> Days, I worked at the Eager Street Clinic, the patients, mostly black.<br> They came with their sundry of generic complaints and maladies,<br> and conditions, many consequent to the tragedies of inner city life.<br> Drug addictions, alcohol abuse, teen pregnancies, <br> sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS.<br> Some come high on something, or down on another,<br> reeking of thunderbird wine, eyes ablaze, pupils dilated barely able to stay awake.<br> Part of the days, always spent in filling up their disability and medicaid forms<br> urgently needed to access their food stamps and month's end checks.<br> Many times, food stamps are sold or exchanged for heroin or crack.<br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">140</font><br> If you have time to listen, there are a thousand and one stories.<br> Stories from the 'hood. <br> Of helplessness and hopelessness.<br> A daughter dying of AIDS. A son gone to prison.<br> A child slain by an errant drive-by bullet.<br> A son's suicide and a letter she has read a hundred times,<br> trying to understand, searching for answers in prayers and from God.<br> A daughter just out of crack detox, returning to a home<br> in a street where everyone is either using or selling.<br> A mother in and out of detox, her drug needs paid for by tricks,<br> shoplifting sales, or selling her children's Christmas toys.<br> At month's end, men and women, young and old, line up, diving to the ground, <br> as they fight over samples of crack vials thrown from a back dark-tinted window of a gold-colored Lexus,<br> whetting drug appetites for tomorrow's food stamps and medicaid checks.<br> When the checks arrive, the dealer next door sell out by noon time, seventy thousand, easy.<br> There's a young woman with AIDS, selling tricks to support a 150-dollar-a-day drug addiction. <br> Drug runners in too many street corners, with their languages of whistles and signals.<br> Where are the men? <br> <strong>We're all afraid. Nothing we can do. You call the cops, they don't come.<br> If they come, the dealers will get back at you for snitching. </strong><br> <strong>We can't sit on the steps or stoops anymore.<br> When the sun sets, you go inside. To your TV, to your VCR.</strong><br> Where are grandmothers and grandfathers? <br> They have become foster parents, baby sitters to grandchildren<br> whose mothers are out searching for crack, whose fathers are serving time.<br> Stories from the 'hood, sometimes you can't help it, a tear breaks through.<br> All I can do is listen. A silent touching of hands. A hand on the shoulder.<br> They are thankful that I took time to listen.<br> Many times they say <strong>thank you</strong>. <br> Sometimes, it's a slow quiet nod of the head.<br> Sometimes, a hug.<br> <font size="+7">141</font><br> I learned to listen. Made time to listen.<br> Learned how to draw out the stories, <br> Countless little stories and details of their lives.<br> Their vegetable gardens. Hoping the tomatoes will be as good this year.<br> Their weekend bus trip to the casino, their pockets emptied, their bellies stuffed.<br> An upcoming cruise, a lifetime dream.<br> A family illness or death. A wedding. Their thanksgiving dinner.<br> I made little cryptic notes, tiny drawings on the corner of the chart. <br> A tomato. A cruise ship. A wedding cake.<br> Or innocent little drawings for information only I can read, <br> a nose for cocaine use, a line-graphic for a marihuana joint.<br> On the next visit as the notes and drawings remind me,<br> their faces lighting up as I ask about the tomato garden,<br> how the cruise was or where they went for the honeymoon.<br> I sensed it was part of the reaching out,<br> an intangible of the healing process – <br> in inexplicable ways, seen as concern and compassion,<br> translating into potent placebo components. . . and trust. <br> <font size="+7">142</font><br> The clinic support staff were mostly black. <br> It took some time, but slowly, as i earned their trust<br> they started sharing with me the intimate details of their lives.<br> Learned the nuances of black language, <br> their signals, their postures, their struts.<br> Some referred to me as 'brother' or 'homey,' <br> not in disrespect, but as a final word of acceptance. <br> Sometimes, I was allowed to enter rooms in their inner sanctums,<br> lined with anger, scarred by prejudice, simmering beneath the surface.<br> A few spoke openly of their resentment and distrust of whites.<br> Of this or that clinic doctor's obvious prejudice.<br> A few times, I argued. They would parry: <strong>You're blind. You just can't see it.</strong><br> A few years later, I watched and listened from a distance <br> as the OJ Simpson verdict was being read,<br> the staff glued to a small television<br> the eerie silence suddenly breaking into a resounding burst of cheer and elation.<br> It was a communal celebration, not of Simpson's vindication.<br> Something else, from deep inside, that linked their cheer and elation together.<br> One trusted me enought to say: <strong>It's a get-back.</strong><br> <font size="+7">143</font><br> In 1989, i applied for a part-time job in an inner city clinic that provided care for people with HIV and AIDS.<br> It was a time when HIV was no longer ignorable,<br> spreading and breaking out of its shell,<br> starting to appear in small community hospitals.<br> ignorance terrorizing the public, even the community of doctors.<br> Many refused to care for them, instead referred them out.<br> Most doctors, even infectious disease specialists referred them to the university <br> or clinics funded and set up to provide specialilzed services and care.<br> It was a fringe population of patients that society then would rather keep on ignoring,<br> blaming it on the consequences of their addictions, <br> homesexuality, promiscuities, and life-style choices and risk-laden adventures.<br> <font size="+7">144</font><br> In the interview, the clinic medical director asked<br> <strong>Will you have any problems working with gay people?<br> </strong>The clinic was manned and ran by a front-liine of foot soldiers –<br> volunteer doctors, nurses, medical assistants, nutritionists and clerks.<br> For most gays and lesbians, sexual orientation is easily revealed by nuances of body language and voice.<br> Some are unexpressed, choosing an anonymity of orientation.<br> preferring to give a history of addiction and intravenous drug use<br> as source of HIV rather than admit to homosexuality. <br> Or, an accidental needle stick. <br> Or an accidental splash of blood.<br> A few years working in the clinic, I was relating stories of a recent travel with a girl-friend<br> and the nurse gave me a quizzical look, asked<br> <strong>You're not gay?</strong><br> <em>No.</em><br> <strong>We all thought. . . see, everyone here is either gay or lesbian.</strong><br> <em>No. Dr J. is straight.</em><br> <strong>No. We think he's gay.</strong><br> <font size="+7">145</font><br> It was a a polarizing time, shrouded by fear, mystery and ignorance.<br> The afflicted shunned into a purgatory of intolerances, festering discriminations, anti-gay hysteria<br> the fire stoked by fundamentalists, always ready with extracted biblical passages<br> ranting on the afflicted with pronouncements of God's wrath and vengeful punishments. <br> as the circus played – the media, politicians<br> and the scientific egos racing for their grail of discoveries.<br> I, too, was gripped by ignorance and fear. <br> I gloved my fears. <br> At first, I double-gloved, threatened by uncertainties of contaminations<br> everytime I poked, palpated or drew blood.<br> A few times I got splattered with blood, sprayed with saliva.<br> Once I bled from, scratched by a patient's fingernail.<br> There were sleepless nights.<br> Some patients brought pastries and cakes, some baked by themselves.<br> At first, I could not partake of them, made sundry comic excuses, <br> that I just had dinner, imagining the virus smouldering in them. <br> In some places, surgeons wore astronaut-type insulated surgical gowns,<br> as industry urgently looked into the commerce and profit<br> of making metal-based gloves impervious to needle sticks or scalpel cuts.<br> Some doctors were afraid to touch infected patients,<br> some afraid to breath the same air.<br> A colleague asked me <strong>Why are you doing it?</strong><br> I don't remember what I said. But likely nothing with any profundity.<br> <em>There's not too many doctors doing it.</em> . . or, just because.<br> She was so moved. Ignorance and fear can do that.<br> She said <strong>You will be blessed by God.</strong><br> I did not see God in the trenches.<br> <font size="+7">146</font><br> This was the time of AIDS before AZT,<br> when all we could advise were untested supplements<br> and the uncertain promise that drugs were just around the corner.<br> The gay community's grapevine was incredibly efficient.<br> with its bourgeoning underground commerce of fringe therapies,<br> anything that could blunt the edge of hopelessness.<br> They shared with me their secret concoctions of self-medications.<br> Animal organ and exotic plant extracts, <br> herbal concoctions from far-flung corners of the world.<br> Many were still asymptomatic. <br> But many were starting to get sick. A few were dyiing.<br> Patients were coming, searching for hope, asking questions. <br> <strong>When will i die? <br> How much longer do I have left? <br> Can I still buy a car?</strong><br> And what do you say to a 16-year old black kid who says<strong> I gonna die.</strong><br> Or another who says<strong> It's government orchestrated ethnic genocide.</strong><br> Or another whose father, a minister, banished him for his homosexuality.<br> Sometimes there are no answers<br> but bromides of hope laced with white lies<br> as we dispense uncertain and unproven pharmaceuticals<br> hoping that science will deliver more drugs or the vaccine<br> just around the desperate corners of their lives.<br> <font size="+7">147</font><br> Early on, for the infected, for the symptomatic, there was so little hope.<br> Patients continued to die, despite the ephemeral promise of the drugs<br> that followed AZT – the NRTIs and the NNRTIs,<br> before the arrival of protease inhibitors<br> As lives became predictably abbreviated,<br> viatical settlements came into vogue, patients selling their insurance policies<br> desperate to fast-forward a future dream for a fling tomorrow.<br> Dying was the constant ogre, becoming so familiar.<br> Everyone knew someone dying or who died, a friend or lover,<br> John H. says he is the only one left in his circle of fifteen friends.<br> A common story, of circles lost.<br> Rare is the gentle death, dying usually sufferingly slow.<br> Some chose to orchestrate their deaths, deciding when and how.<br> Before the dementia or the diarrhea disables. <br> Before the emaciation immobilizes or dermatologic cancer exposes.<br> By a death cocktail concocted from hoarded prescriptions <br> of nembutals, valiums, antinauseants and a bottle of cabernet.<br> By assisted suicide.<br> By hanging.<br> It is never easy, talking to the wife or lover left behind.<br> Sometimes, they shared the details.<br> A letter left behind.<br> The handful of pills.<br> The infusions or the intravenous ways of dying.<br> The holding of hands.<br> Often, despite the cruel slowness of their deaths,<br> the peaceful way their lovers passed away.<br> <font face="Arial"><font size="+7">148</font><br> A patient's wife shared the details.<br> She needed to talk about it.<br> Perhaps, to find closure.<br> Her husband drove from Canada to Baltimore every four or six weeks.<br> kept his appointments faithfully.</font><br> Perhaps the distance kept his disease in secrecy.<br> He was a muslim, bisexual, and progressing in his disease.<br> She knew of his infection, forgiveness given long ago.<br> She also saw an increasing despondency.<br> as he anguished over the shame<br> and the suffering he was causing her.<br> One day, she came home to find everything spotlessly clean<br> nothing in its usual state of disarray.<br> The bedroom likewise.<br> She knew before she saw the note, taped on the bathroom door.<br> <strong>Please don't come in alone.</strong><br> She called a close friend.<br> He hanged himself.<br> There was a note, asking for forgiveness.<br> He was buried before the next sundown<br> with the usual trimmings of muslim rituals.<br> The death certificate lists the cause of death as suicide.<br> His illness forever concealed.<br> <font size="+7">149</font><br> By the time I walked away from AIDS medicine, the landscape had changed.<br> There was more science. <br> A family of protease inhibitors has been added to the treatment armamentaria.<br> The virus became undetectable even with the more sensitive lab testing.<br> Cell counts were pushed down and maintained at low levels.<br> Before I left, beckoned to another crossroad,<br> I had attained a level of expertise, caring for more than 150 AIDS patients in two clinics.<br> I was dispensing real hope, not old hope laced with lies and heavy doses of placebo.<br> Rather than the merciless truncation of lives I saw early on,<br> the patients were living longer.<br> Many have gone back to school, or planning to.<br> Many looked at a future filled with the clutter of mundane things and normal dreams.<br> It was a different kind of medicine, for a long time, more art than science.<br> It tested the hippocratic tenets and maxims of medicine.<br> Yet, it was the part of medicine In its landscape of the dead and dying<br> that left me fulfilled the most, <br> enriched by the privilege of working with a community of volunteers, of gays and lesbians<br> who gave to a population of patients, immeasurable caring, concern and compassion<br> while so many others stayed in the sidelines.<br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">150</font><br> Those years also filled with stories of gay patients and their lovers<br> staying on together until the end, <br> one taking care of the other, one to be left behind<br> through the dementia, the diarrhea, the emaciation, <br> through the days disabled by multidrug side effects,<br> feeding cleaning bathing comforting <br> caring love committment devotion<br> companion husband lover friend.<br> A window into stories of love.<br> And for those ministers of their gods who rant and rave against this kind of love between men<br> for the politicians who rant and rave against same-sex love and marriage<br> look in this window and read the stories from their Book Of Love<br> and perhaps learn a thing or two about compassion<br> or learn something new about love. <br> <font size="+7">151</font><br> <strong>In 1990, a 7.7 Richter earthquake struck central and northern Luzon.</strong><br> Baguio, the summer capital, suffered widespread devastation.<br> The house I built by the edge of a cliff, cracked and twisted on its beams,<br> and leaned precariously 15 degrees to the cliffside.<br> The aftershocks were strong and the threat as strong<br> that the house would tumble and crumble down the cliff.<br> Arthur suggested that the house be stripped, save what could be saved,<br> and haul the innards to Manila.<br> The aftershocks did continue for a time, as the grounds shifted and settled,<br> and by some fluke or by the grace of the rice gods, the house untilted back.<br> <font size="+7">152</font><br> <strong>In 1991, Mt Pinatubo erupted,</strong><br> a cataclysmic event that spewed magma, minerals and metals,<br> and aerosolized the atmosphere with a global layer of chemical haze.<br> Some said it imbued the sunsets with a deeper palette of colors.<br> <font size="+7">153</font><br> In 1992, Arthur died. Young, at 52. unexpected.<br> But in the retelling of his last month with the seemingly benign indigestive complaints,<br> from his cumulation of life-style indulgences and from the history I gathered,<br> it was most likely a cardiac death.<br> Because Rollie was visiting in Maryland at that time, I did not return to the Philippines for the funeral.<br> Instead, Rollie and I exchanged reminiscences.<br> Rollie interjected more than once, sighing with relief, that after many years of a strained relationship with Arthur,<br> he was able to patch up things, started talking to him again before he left for the States. <br> There was much we talked about, his last years of anomie,<br> of hard luck, scrapping an existence at the barrel's bottom.<br> Tiaong providiing a sanctuary and lifestyle on the fringe<br> of excesses served and cloaked from view by his faithful minions.<br> A few months later, a strange occurrence of sounds visited in the Fell's Point abode.<br> The sound of an alarm clock, went on and off, fifteen seconds at a time,<br> going around the bedroom, as a friend and I searched in vain for the source of the ringing.<br> Eventually, it stopped. <br> The night before, he came is a dream.<br> Knocked on the alley door. I asked him <strong>What are you doing here?</strong><br> <em>To visit.</em><br> A visitation. A goodbye.<br> <font size="+7">154</font><br> Sometime in the 80s, I discovered the joys of camping<br> catering to my penchant for solitude and aloneness.<br> I preferred the primitive campsites to campgrounds,<br> or in campgrounds I sought a spot farthest away from the madding crowd.<br> I never used the campground facilities,<br> instead set my own campsite shower and a chemical tent-porta-potti box.<br> I became quite proficient camper, setting up camp and gear in record time.<br> Once a campground ranger watched as I put together a 10'x12' screen tent,<br> a complicated tangle of poles, usually a combined effort for two people.<br> When I finished, he came up, quite impressed, shook my hand and said: <br> <strong>I've never seen anyone do that alone.</strong><br> Slowly, I accumulated camping equipment, watched in amazement, <br> as they continued to shrink into size and increase in portability and functionality.<br> Nope.This was no free-spiritied Marlboro-Man kind of low-gear camping.<br> This was high-end, creature-comfort state-of-the-art tent camping.<br> <font size="+7">1<font color="#000000">55</font></font><br> Early spring, in the chill of lingering winter, before the crowds,<br> I camped in the sand dunes of Assateague Island. <br> Summertime, the North East states tempts a respite from Baltimore's dog days.<br> In the fall, the raging palette of West Virginia's foliage beckoned.<br> Once, I camped alone for two weeks, high up a West Virginia mountain.<br> At night, I listened to the winds moan and snake through the valleys,<br> the unfamiliar sounds of animals, more threatening in the dark,<br> the rustle of leaves and the snapping of twigs<br> seeming approaching footsteps of forest ogres<br> poking fear through the flimsy barriers of tent,<br> a loaded shotgun by my side, providing an ephemeral dose of courage.<br> Half the time, I camped alone. Half the times, with friends.<br> In solitude, or sharing it.<br> <font size="+7">15<font color="#000000">6</font></font><br> One winter, on adolescent impulse, I bought a snow mobile.<br> My friend Richard provided the brawn and company,<br> single-handedly loading and unloading the snowmobile in his pickup,<br> We drove to Potter Country, Pennsylvania,<br> two winter cowboys intent on a two-week adventure<br> through twisting snow-covered mountain trails.<br> Late afternoon, bone-tired from hours of bumping through packed snow trails,<br> we picked a spot off the trail, shoveled out a space for our tent, <br> set up an early camp to rest our weary souls.<br> The adrenaline slowly settling down, it felt like an icebox inside the tent.<br> Almost in unison, we said T<strong>his is fucking cold.</strong><br> The two winter cowboys skedaddled out of the cold<br> to the warm cozy comforts of an inn.<br> It was an exhausting outdoor activity.<br> We gave up on Potter County in three days.<br> Drove up north to Niagara Falls, New York<br> back down to Deep Creek Lake in WV,<br> seeking little adventures from the wintry landscape,<br> going full throttle-crazy against the bitter cold<br> up challenging hills and across the expanses of frozen lakes.<br> Great fun, but the cold beat us up.<br> W</font><font face="Arial">e were back in Baltimore in 10 days, with leftover days.<br> <br> <font size="+7">15<font color="#000000">7</font></font><br> In the mid-90s, I packed my 6-month old VW for a 21-day cross-country odyssey.<br> Wanting an able-bodied companion, Roy, a drug-indulging Baltimore local, accepted an invite.<br> One condition. It was a drug-free trip. And readily, he agreed.<br> Packed the car to brim-and-hilt, saved for sliver of the backview on the rear-view mirror.<br> Two tents, cookware, guitar, portable toilet, sketchbooks, art supply essentials,<br> maps, guides, medical bag, wine, cheese and crackers. <br> Even lambanog laced with Pear-Williams, a bottle of 20-year old Port.<br> A CB-radio, short-wave radio, small TV.<br> There was no set time-schedule or destination,<br> other than a decision to avoid the big cities and camp only in National and State Parks. <br> The rest was whim and winging-it, with a nightly map-check on where-am-i? and where-next?<br> I pointed the VW westward, barrelled out through the Pennsylvania turnpike.<br> Slept the first night in the VW in some truckstop. <br> Then to Wisconsin through Minnesota, to South Dakota and Mt. Rushmore.<br> <font size="+7">158</font><br> On the third day, woke up to find Roy gone. His tent neatly folded.<br> I thought he might have fallen off the cliff. <br> Searched everywhere, even looked down the camp toilet, <br> thinking he might have been <br> butt-sucked off the earth while doing his thing.<br> I walked around the campsite, hollering his name. <br> A few campers thought I was looking for my dog.<br> Finally, at the ranger station, I learned of a big man with a red bandana on his pate,<br> toting a small suitcase, walking out into the highway, a few hours ago.<br> The VW caught up with him miles down the road, in a junction, waiting for a ride.<br> A Cheech-and-Chong episode worthy of a Saturday Night Live.<br> <em>Roy! Jesus H. Christ! What the fuck?</em> <br> <strong>I don't feel good about this trip.</strong><br> <em>Fuck! You could have left a note. I thought you fell off the fucking cliff!</em><br> <strong>I'll hitchhike back to Baltimore. I've seen it on TV. I've always wanted to do that.</strong><br> <em>You have no fucking money!</em><br> <strong>That's ok. I'll do small jobs along the way.</strong><br> Yeah, fuckin' cowboy.<br> Offered him money, which he refused.<br> <em>Fuck you!<br> </em>And I drove away. Ten miles later, gripped with concern, I turned back.<br> Found him in same junction, still waiting for a hitching ride.<br> After refusing it a second and third time, he finally took 200 dollars.<br> I said <em><br> Fuck you!</em> <br> and drove away a second time.<br> A year or two later he came to me, repentant and apologetic,<br> saying he was going through drug withdrawal at that time.<br> <font size="+7">159</font><br> Minus my burly companion, to fend off small bears and generic threats, I felt vulnerable.<br> But decided to forge ahead. . . <br> into Wyoming through the tip of Bighorn National Forest. <br> Breaking to camp at Yellowstone Park.<br> Vistas changed like an impatient slide show, spectacular scenic delights<br> that unfolded as I screeched around unending winding roads and perilous bends,<br> Ice-capped mountains, gullies, rock formations, through blinding rain and thunderstorms, <br> from rushing rivers below through 15-foot snow walls up the mountain roads,<br> to the Grand Canyons, through the tundras and petrified dunes of New Mexico<br> into its vast white dune park. through Arizona, lined with cacti and Joshua trees.<br> Through Vegas, the Death Valley, Redwood and Yosemite National Park,<br> through the breathtaking coastline of Oregon, through countless small towns and scenic back roads.<br> Some days, less than a 100 miles took me to the next National Park.<br> Some days I drove more than 500, once or twice, close to 700,<br> decamping at the break of dawn, ending the day late at night, soaked in scenery but weary to the bone,<br> sometimes too tired to pitch a tent, i struggled into a restless sleep<br> hopelessly attempting to rearrange limbs and torso <br> in the cramped unforgiving front-seat space of the Golf.<br> Some nights, too weary to cook, feeding the hunger with wine, cheese and bread.<br> Every fourth or fifth night, I sough the comforts of a motel along the route,<br> to indulge in a hot shower, clean the toilet equipment, and catch CNN.<br> I became the proficient camper, pitching and dismantling camp with increasing ease.<br> and surviving on food fare that would put to shame many weight-loss diet regimens.<br> Often, I slept to the sounds of the deepening night, weighed down by weariness, <br> sleep shattering to wakefulness to the deafening rushing of rivers<br> or the maddening cacophonous singing of birds. <br> A dissonance most welcome, remembering the urban morning sounds that wakened,<br> garbage trucks and the metal clanking of its jaws.<br> And better to leave before the campsite awakens,<br> when the boomboxes and car-stereos blare the rap and the rock.<br> Early starts brought sightseeing bounties. The peaceful valleys still in slumber.<br> The early sunlight and the morning mist casting its ethereal veil.<br> In Washington State, contemplated heading back east through Canada.<br> Decided against it and started the back through the vastness of Montana, <br> the Glacier National Park, theater of its massive chamelionic clouds<br> casting undulating waves shadows on barren prairie plains.<br> The manic-frenetic pace was cathcing up fast, getting wearier by the day.<br> I was starting to talk to myself, reading highway sounds and plate-numbers aloud.<br> Tired of the CB radio's mindless prattle<br> and the recurrent country music songs of lost loves and tortured souls.<br> The rest of trip back was a blur. . .through ND, Minnesota, Wisconcin,<br> Illonois, Indiana, Ohio, Penn back to Maryland,<br> 20 days and more than 12,000 miles later.<br> After, 80 plus countries, nothing yet compares to the scenic beauty in that cross-country odyssey.<br> <font color="#0000FF" size="+7">160</font><br> The 80-plus countries, many twice- and thrice-traveled fill up a travel cache<br> of stories, photographs and memories, doses of great fun and inevitable sufferances. <br> Delays and detours, lost and misplaced luggage, missed flights, missed trains,<br> culinary disasters and gastrointestinal intolerances, and the sundry of mysterious travel ailments.<br> And there have been many occasions that took me out of medical anonymity<br> to become the Good Samaritan.<br> One medical travel story comes to the forefront – <a href="MoroccoTravelStory.html">Morocco</a>.<br> <font size="+7">161<br> </font>It was suppose to be a 9-day travel in Morocco, sampling sight, history, culture and cuisine<br> in its main cities - Rabat, Casablanca, Meknes, Fes, and Marrakech.<br> On the second night, I noticed a fellow traveler, a lady from New York, dining alone,<br> without her artist husband whom I met the night before. <br> She said <strong>He has taken ill</strong>. <strong>Fever, abdominal pains and diarrhea.</strong> <br> That night, I took myself out of medical anonymity and made a "house call."<br> The following day, the husband rejoined the tour bus, brimming an appreciative smile.<br> That following day, ambling through the narrow stone-walled streets of the Marrakech market,<br> I watched helpless, as a donkey, trotting down the cobbled-stone pathway,<br> its wares strapped on its back and precariously balanced on both sides, <br> squeaking by the New York lady, with horror on her face, forced against the wall<br> the donkey load pressing and crushing on her chest. <br> An auscultatory exam reassured that the lungs were not crushed.<br> her breathlessness, more from panic, and the pain from contusion.<br> I treated her with reassuring follow-ups and and regular doses of Tylenol.<br> Alas, by the fifth day, one of the nemesis of foreign travel was increasingly taking toll,<br> more than half of the travel group was already taken ill by a diarrheic malady.<br> By the sixth day, more added to the count, some even projectile vomiting in public places,<br> frantically searching and hurrying-scurrying to public restrooms.<br> It was a a dispirited and gloomy busload-full of tourists, in heaves and runs. <br> as I dispensed from rapidly dwindling supplies of antibiotics, analgesics and antidiarrheals.<br> Providence must have intervened, and the last days left in Morocco were enjoyed in intestinal calm.<br> Until. . . the last day, assembled in the lobby, our Moroccan guide was running quite late, <br> hurriedly giving last-minute instructions on the etcetera of airport procedures and paperwork. <br> Then, barely finished, the last word still hanging from his lip, he turned around, <br> intent on a fast clip and stride to hurriedly lead his flock of travelers to the bus . . .<br> <strong>Wham! Ka-BonK!</strong><br> He walked right into this massive Samsonesque marble hotel pillar. <br> Stupefied, he slowly collapsed to the floor, a wide bleeding gash over his left eye. <br> He refused to be taken to the local hospital, and pleaded with me <strong>Please do something</strong>.<br> Curtained by a half-circle of concerned fellow travelers, I did a sutureless wound closure.<br> Later, in the bus, en route to the airport, watching the moroccan guide in his bloodied <I>caftan</I><br> and a left eye half closed from pressure bandages and steri-strips<br> and the rest of the travelers in intestinal calm, I indulged in a moment of self-satisfaction. <br> Generic problems, yes. And I thought, <strong>Go ahead! Thrown in a cardiac arrest. I'm up for it. <br> </strong>A little later, barely settled on the return flight via New York, there came the amplified call.<br> <strong>Is there a doctor on board?<br> </strong>Anonymity was no longer possible. I was sitting next to the New York couple. <br> With the rest of the Escherichian-afflicted scattered all over the plane.<br> I just hoped the call was not for something gastrointestinal.<br> The Good Samaritan was led to an 80-plus elderly male, feverish and achy with a viral affliction<br> which I treated with reassurances, fluids and acetaminophen.<br> Barely settled back in my seat, the stewardess came to me and whispered<br> that a woman was waiting in the galley, needing assistance.<br> And off to the galley Good Sam went, and there, behind the drawn curtains<br> was this drop-dead gorgeous French woman in a red floral-printed dress (a detail I strangely remember),<br> holding a vial of antibiotic on one hand and a syringe on the other, <br> pleading in stuttered English that she is hours late on an injection dose,<br> for what i surmised was for a sexually-transmitted disease.<br> Before my hesitation and concern could deepen into doubts,<br> the lady lifeted her skirt, pulled her panties downs, to expose a full left <em>derriere</em><br> with visible injection marks, giving verity and justifiable urgency to her request.<br> Yes, I gave her the shot. <br> And, no, the cardiac arrest did not happen my way, although I did not stop imagining its occurrence<br> until after I have extracted my bags from the airport carousel in Baltimore.<br> It was not all medicine. There was a day in Fez, its medina, the scents and sounds in the souks shops<br> the color and costumes of the street theater of Moroccan men and women in their jalabas and kaftans.<br> It was a memorable travel, the travel medicine made it doubly so.<br> <font size="+7">162<br> </font>In the 90s, a trimmed-down schedule of medical work allowed more travels <br> and more frequent visits to the Philippines which included vists to the family farm in Tiaong,<br> 50-some hilly hectares of agricultural land with a peak that provided<br> a circumferential view of the mountains and the verdant countryside,<br> the neighboring barangays, the green of the ricefields and the blanketing coconut trees,<br> and in the distance the imposing twin peaks of Mts. Banahaw and Cristobal.<br> To family, it was the Farm and the Peak. <br> OId-timers referred to the Farm as "Proces," a rural contraction for an uncle's four women in his life.<br> The peak was referred to as "Pulang Lupa" for its red gravelly volcanic soil.<br> Others call it "Pinagbanderahan" (flag site) where the Japanese held strategic camp during its provincial occupation.<br> To family, the Peak was the traditional destination for the young ones on Easter sunday gathering. <br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">163</font><br> With my brother Louie, there were recurrent evenings, tippling on 90-some proof lambanog <br> that never failed to fuel our conversations, designing little dreams, dreaming little visions.<br> Of building a small public library, for the town had none.<br> Or a small school, a one-room school, even amusing ourselves<br> thinking of a name. . . Liceo Pulang Lupa.<br> In 1997, I went up the peak, accompanied by Ruben, a long-time on-and-off family employee.<br> when he was away from intermittent NPA employ.<br> We pitched tents and camped for three days,<br> clearing the overgrowths and saplings, slowly revealing the surrounding vista. <br> In campfired nights, I listened to Ruben tell his stories of the land, <br> under a celestial canopy, ablaze with its constellations<br> and engulfed by layers of sounds hiding in the dark.<br> As the clearing was completed, the peak revealed itself, a vast and empty canvas,<br> sitting atop a hill overlooking a circumferential vista of mountains and the verdant countryside.<br> <font size="+7">164<br> </font>In April 1998, I started building Pulang Lupa.<br> At the start, my brother Rollie was a great help, allowing me to return to my Baltimore clinics.<br> It was his long time dream, one much older than mine, to make something of the land.<br> And before him, my mother and older brother Arthur, all dreaming something for the idle land.<br> He shared in my excitement, the possibilities were intoxicating.<br> He supervised the laying of the foundation works for the first buildings.<br> Sadly, he would never see the fruition of our dream.<br> <font size="+7">165</font><br> Early on in my return visit in July, I was notifed Rollie suddenly took ill.<br> Later I would learn he went into cardiac arrest in Los Baños and taken to Manila.<br> He had previous confrontations with cardiac problems.<br> About a year ago, he was airlifted from Mindanao<br> diagnosed to have a heart attack, subsequently had a quadruple bypass.<br> Unfortunately, he could not shed his lifestyle dependencies.<br> When I got to the emergency room, I found him beyond help,<br> with signs of irreversible hypoxic brain damage,<br> his pupils fixed and dilated<br> his vital signs pharmaceutically manintained.<br> I told his family of the hopeless prognosis<br> and the heroics of needless procedures were canceled.<br> He was taken to his room where his family and kin awaited.<br> To die there, rather than in the impersonal and too clinical death<br> midst the chaotic theater of the emegency room.<br> To me, he was gone.<br> Or perhaps, if his spirit lingered, he was just waiting for the goodbyes to be said.<br> A year ago, while he was recovering from his first attack, we talked.<br> Or, rather, he talked and I listened.<br> Stories that opened a window into his life, hidden from view.<br> Stories that resuscitated as he lay in his death bed<br> in a tangled curtain of wires, tubings, and intravenous lines<br> in the rhythmic mechanical sounds of the respirator <br> as his heart streamed green patterns of beats across the monitor screen.<br> So I waited, until I thought the goodbyes were said,<br> prayers offered, forgiveness given or asked.<br> I started to taper down the medicines, a little at a time, watched the numbers drop<br> and the heart's green complexes slowing to a rhythm before inevitable fibrillation<br> and I said <strong>He's leaving us.</strong><br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">166</font><br> The early construction of Pulang Lupa was all consuming.<br> It was hampered by the weather and water supply always wanting.<br> Often, it is by a small truck tankloads of of river water.<br> When the rains would make the road impassable for deliveries,<br> Ruben would painstakingly shovel water accumulating in pools<br> into buckets and small drums of water.<br> Horses would supplement the supply by hauling five-gallon jugs<br> stapped on its back from the village deep wells.<br> Many times, work stopped waiting for weather to clear and the roads to dry.<br> There were no architectural plans. No engineers.<br> Just a foreman to orchestrate the work with a motley crew of artisans and laborers,<br> We drew plans on cardboard boxes, backs of old calendar pages and scraps of plywood,<br> forever disappearing as kindling or some secondary use.<br> Eventually the foreman caught up with what I was trying to achieve.<br> Lines, alignments, symmetries and various design elements.<br> Quite a few times I would tear down and redo things that didn't look right to me,<br> to the foreman Vic's head-scratching incredulity.<br> <font size="+7">167</font><br> Twice a week, wednesdays and saturdays, when the day's work was done,<br> I brought out a half-gallon of lambanog, <br> to the men's delight and their waiting wives' dismay.<br> The jiggerful of arrack would go round-and-round,<br> fueling and loosening the men's storytelling,<br> as the decibels increased and the stories slurred.<br> And I was the voracious listener, taking the occasional jigger,<br> while slowly being filled with the stories of their lives.<br> stories, often too familiar, even the new ones, easily palpable.<br> opening windows from my past. <br> <font size="+7">168</font><br> The one-room school house did not happen.<br> Instead, it mushrromed into a complex of buildings.<br> On a personal level, it was akin to a gigantic sculpture, <br> or a vast empty canvas that slowly filled up<br> with a collage of buildings connected by steps and walkways, <br> careful that the elements did not obstruct each other,<br> each sharing in the scenic vista of mountains and countryside.<br> I stared at empty spaces, endlessly sketching in my mind.<br> progressing to an irrepresible creative mania,<br> drawing and redrawing, designing and redesigning, <br> adding, extending, altering, tearing down and rebuilding.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">169</font><br> During the early years of Pulang Lupa's construction, I was returning twice a year to Tiaong,<br> staying 3 months at a time, a few times, longer.<br> Although the Baltimore clinics adapted to my long absences,<br> continuity of care was starting to suffer from the three month absences.<br> I quit mmy regular clinic at Eager Street and stated taking assignments in the satellite clinics, <br> covering physicians on vacation, conferences, sabatticals or maternity leaves.<br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">170</font><br> I was struck by the religiosity of the inner city folk.<br> They relinquished to God's will the outcome of their illnesses and sufferances.<br> Early on, I used to smile when they would say as they survive their illness <br> <strong>I thank God and I thank you.</strong><br> They tell me how they prayed.<br> I was arrogant and amused, having to share with their beliefs<br> what I thought was the fruit of my labors and the ministrations of medicine.<br> But somewhere along the countless minuets of life and death<br> of lives saved and lives lost, even as science triumphed, <br> I came to realize prayers were more than generic doses of placebo.<br> And learned from the patients, its powers, its comforting ways.<br> And in the end, it was I who rediscovered prayer.<br> Some kind of epiphany from watching the patients<br> in their resolute strength, serenity and resignation. <br> If it was placebo, it worked bettter than those ones we prescribed or uttered.<br> Later, whatever its pathways or mechanisms, it became part of my treatment.<br> Talking about prayer. Telling them to pray <br> for the many wonderful ways it would help what I was trying to do.<br> <font size="+7">171</font><br> My mother died In 2000. She was 86.<br> For years her health has been in slow and age-related steady decline and disrepair.<br> She adapted to the gradual deepening darkness of her world<br> while contuing her daily kilometer or exercise, walking aroung the big dining table<br> her path cleared of chairs and obstacles,<br> a completed circle marked by a piece of tape at the the table's edge.<br> Her days were filled with mental word games, jumbles and crossword puzzles,<br> a long list of mnemonic exercises, and hours listening to readings from her children.<br> She had long resigned herself to the eventuality of her death,<br> dreading the specter of intensive care unit, immobilized with tubes and wires<br> intubated and hooked to a mechanical ventilator.<br> So many times, she voiced her fears <br> and asked for reassurances that her life not be needlessly prolonged.<br> She initially resisted, later consenting, to the implantation of a temporary pacemaker.<br> Her string of illnesses brought her to regular visits to physicians and specialists.<br> Alas, too many times, I was angered and horrified <br> at the recurrent instances of negligence, inattention and incompetence.<br> <font size="+7">172</font><br> She was eventually hospitalized, for exploratory surgery for a suspected colon cancer.<br> A cough and respiratory difficulty raised the possibility of pulmonary embolism.<br> I wrote a clinical summary which included my clinical impressions.<br> Alas, but my suspicions were discounted.<br> Her condition needed to be stabilized before surgery.<br> And stabilize, it did not. Suboptimal care saw to that.<br> My mother's condition worsened daily and In about 10 days, she was much worse.<br> Her lungs were filling up with fluid.<br> She asked to be taken home. To die.<br> The scheduled lung scan done on her day of discharge <br> confirmed the earlier suspicion of pulmonary embolism.<br> <strong>I am tired. Please. I just want to go home.</strong><br> <font color="#0000FF" size="+7">173</font><br> We took mama home. To die.<br> Away from the hospital ambience of white-starched nurses,<br> restricted visitation hours, the cackling interruptive intrusions of the paging system.<br> In a room at home, surrounded by family, giving care, keeping vigil.<br> I slowly withdrew her medications and fluids.<br> And replaced them with medications to keep her comfortable.<br> In the process, science and pharmaceuticals failed in its expected mechanisms.<br> She suffered the discomforts of dehydration,<br> as she drifted in and out of a semi-coma,<br> her parched lips instinctively sucking of wet towels<br> opening her mouth to small doses of ice chips.<br> There was time for forgiveness, for prayers, for closure.<br> She passed away, surrounded by family.<br> And as she wished, was cremated on the same day.<br> <font size="+7">174</font><br> My mother's dying continues to haunt me to this day,<br> wondering what more I could have done.<br> Long before she died, she expressed her many fears.<br> Not of dying, but how she would die, how she might suffer.<br> She turned to me, her doctor son. <br> I made a promise, reassurances.<br> That in the end, her death would be a dignified one.<br> Yet, she still suffered in her dying,<br> a few times, awakening, surprised, <br> her fists clenced, thumping the bed with all her feeble strength,<br> whispering <strong>Why am I still alive?</strong><br> Dignity in death does not come easy in a culture ruled by religion<br> its sole ministration, the sacramental anointing of extreme unction<br> and a promise of salvation.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">175</font><br> There was an "ash wake" with the nine days of prayer.<br> After 30 days, there was the traditional "<em>tapusan</em>,"<br> I had a separate celebration in Pulang Lupa, with the villagers joining in prayers and a small feast.<br> Against rural tradtions, the feasting food was not all consumed,<br> and the leftovers were not dispensed of, instead, kept for the staff's meal for the following day.<br> At that time I was not aware of a rural superstition that ominously warned of another death.<br> <font size="+7">176<br> </font>Pulang Lupa continued to sprout up from the ground; buildings kept adding.<br> When the first phase was completed, it was painted. . . white.<br> Imposing, even from afar, from the neighboring barangays,<br> intermittently peeking in sight from the national road,<br> a cluster of white buildings, atop the hill of Lumingon.<br> It lost its <em>Pulang Lupa</em> name, and the new moniker stuck.<br> The White House.<br> As much as I tried to keep the Pulang Lupa name alive,<br> it continues to be called the White House.<br> <font size="+7">177<br> </font>From Pulang Lupa, I stopped by the family house in Mandaluyong<br> to pick up sundry supplies to take to Baguio.<br> I knocked for a minute or longer, calling <strong>Cora! Cora!</strong><br> I went to the adjoining house, asked my sister Angie if Cora was home.<br> She said she was just talking to her an hour or so ago.<br> I got the house key, entered,and found Cora <br> sitting in bed, her back leaning on the wall, her legs hanging by the side.<br> seeming to having fallen asleep while watching television.<br> She did not repond to a gentle slapping of her thigh.<br> I noticed her feet were mottled blue<br> her shorts stained with dry urine.<br> She was dead.<br> Leila wanted to do CPR.<br> The signs dictated otherwise.<br> It was difficult breaking the news to her two children.<br> She was cremated the same day.<br> She died, a year and less than a week after mother's death.<br> <font size="+7">178<br> </font>Cora fills up a room in my heart.<br> Her marriage to Arthur failed so long ago, but she stayed with the family.<br> I do not know what her other choices were, but she chose to stay.<br> She was mother's faithful companion, an alter ego,<br> assumed the burden of her care in her advancing years,<br> her eyes in her years of progressing blindness.<br> As she did for mother, she did for everyone else in the family,<br> and for anyone else in the compound's families of dysfunctional relationships. <br> She was "radio-balita," news and gossip filtered to and through her,<br> not too many secrets safe in her keeping.<br> She was always there with a helping hand, <br> dispensing generic advice and her brand of homespun medicine.<br> And all these in saintly resignation awash in an eternally sunny disposition. <br> <font size="+7">179<br> </font>When I returned to Pulang Lupa and spoke of Cora's death,<br> Mina, the village lady who served as "<em>katiwala</em>" factotum,<br> said she wasn't surprised that she died.<br> A year ago, the small feast that was partaken of in celebration of my mother's"tapusan" prayer ritual <br> was not all consumed, the leftovers kept, instead of all being given away the same day.<br> It foreboded of another death, of a relative or love one, following within a year.<br> <font color="#0000FF" size="+7">180</font><font size="+7"><br> </font>Each return to Pulang Lupa further immersed me into its culture<br> awash in superstitions and alive with mythological creatures.<br> The frightening predatory creatures of childhood suddenly closer, immediate.<br> The kapre, monstrous and hairy, high up on the tree, his presence<br> given away at night, as he puffs on his giant cigar, the red glow lighting his face.<br> The tikbalang, the upper half-horse, the lower human-form, hiding in bamboo groves,<br> preying on those afoot, casting his spell, leading men astray, walking round-and-round.<br> The elves, black or white, <em>duwendeng-item</em> or <em>duwendeng puti</em> , <br> and the earth-dwellers, <em>lamang-lupa</em>, <em>nuno-sa-punso</em>, inhibiting the termite mounds,<br> the other creatures of the night, the asuwang in its various forms, <br> the mananagal, feeding on infant's livers, <br> and the White Lady afloat in ethereal ghosliness,<br> a cast of characters providing theater to their rural lives.<br> <font size="+7">181</font><br> And in this milieu of maladies cast by gnomes and elves<br> of spells, counter spells and possessions,<br> where the villagers whistle to summon a breeze<br> and predict tomorrow's weather by the starriness of the night skies<br> where supertitions rule their lives<br> where the local healers diagnose illnesses<br> from the random configurations of candles, oil, alum, embers and eggs,<br> and dispense their folkloric treatments<br> with concoctions of herbal roots, seeds, leaves and flowers<br> or fragments of paper inscribed with prayers in pig-Latin,<br> pasted on skin or stucked in bodily orifices,<br> and all the final outcomes resigned to God's grace and will <br> . . . I dared practice my brand of Western medicine.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">182</font><br> Patients came up for a variety of reasons.<br> Some out of curiosity. Trying out the American-trained physician's healing ways.<br> Many have already tried out the local healers' sundry of modalities: herbal concoctions, <em>bulongs</em> and <em>orasyons</em>.<br> Many came because I was "less expensive" than a visit to the town doctor. . . free.<br> I didn't charge, and to boot, i handed out free medicines, whenever the treatment<br> can be found in boxes of medical samples accumulated in Baltimore.<br> News of the boxes of pharmaceuticals spread in the grapevine<br> and villagers came bearing prescriptions written by local doctors.<br> Altough it was gratis medicine, and many would come or return<br> with freshly harvested vegetables, sitaw or kalabasa, a papaya, <br> bananas, half of a jackfruit, bags of crackers or peanuts from the sari-sari store,<br> small bottles of achara, yes. . . a chicken, once.<br> Once, a mother came with a small basket of bayabas fruits as her offering of thanks.<br> The next day I ran into her, her basket almost full of bayabas being picked from my brother's trees.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">183</font><br> The rural folk accept death with surprising equanimity.<br> An aging woman down the hill, lightheartedly, yet seriously, asked me a few times,<br> if I had at my disposal: <em><strong>"Ang gamot ng kamatayan</strong></em><strong>"</strong>. . . <em>The death pill.</em><br> She said she had already picked out her burial dress.<br> Alas, a year later, she was dying the slow death<br> suffering the decubiti of bedriddenness and immobility.<br> Another time, past midnight, I was asked to visit a man down the village.<br> In rain and through muddied paths, I trudged,<br> Ruben guiding me through the dark of night.<br> The first thing he said when I came in, was<br> <strong>Tulungan mo ako. Bigyan mo na ako ng gamot ng kamatayan.</strong> <br> (Please help me. Just give me the death pill.)<br> His diagnosis was uncertain. <br> The xrays read possible tuberculosis vs possible metastatic disease.<br> His coffers have long been emptied by many visits to the provincial hospital,<br> that provided no hope; only costly and shortlived relief for his breathlessness.<br> He said he has been sitting up for days, unable to lie down.<br> I told him there was no death pill.<br> But sat with him. And talked to him, with all the situational wisdom I could muster.<br> About dying, about spending what was left of his time<br> in prayers, in closure, in forgiving.<br> I left him a handful of tylenols.<br> A few days later he died.<br> His daughter came up, thanking me for visiting<br> and spending time with her father, for talking to him, <br> for the strong pills that allowed him to rest and sleep so soundly for the next few days.<br> <font size="+7">184</font><br> The practice of medicine exposed its inadequacies, deficiencies, mediocrity,<br> blatant instances of ignorance, inattention and incompentence.<br> Not only in the rural areas where it is in constant competition<br> with the faith healers, medicos and albularyos<br> but also in urban-suburban areas, where its practice is more focused <br> on the commerce and ka-ching of the coffers rather than art of the healing.<br> <font size="+7">185</font><br> But in the ruralandia of Pulang Lupa, <br> medicine is a comic competition between the allopathic and the alternative.<br> In many areas, the medicos and the albularyos rule.<br> More often, the rural folk would preferto believe the folkloric causes of their ailments –<br> earth dwellers, elves, bad winds, and sorcery<br> to the incomprehensible medical mechanisms of pathogenesis.<br> Even with free samples of medicines and reassurances,<br> many would still sneak a visit to the local healer, <br> to be prescribed a magic twig, an herbal decoction, <em>bulong</em> or <em>orasyon</em>.<br> An elderly lady I diagnosed with a breast malinancy, eventually confirmed by biopsy,<br> with worms squiggling out of the tumor, asked if she could visit the local healer, <br> just one more time, the day before she was to go to Manila for surgery,<br> still believing the albularyo who said the lump wasn't a cancer,<br> but caused by a spell cast by one of the creatures of folklore.<br> <font size="+7">186</font><br> I was in Baltimore, during one of my prolonged absences,<br> when I received the news that the Ruben, the Pulang Lupa caretaker, was murdered.<br> It was a well-planned killing, perpetrated at deepening dusk, the electrical lines cut off,<br> approached from behind as he was napping in the courtyard bench.<br> He staggered out of the courtyard, trying to call for help.<br> There was a witness, an 8-year old granddaughter,<br> but unreliable in her fright and the dark of the twilight.<br> There were two suspects.<br> A suspecting husband who spied from high up a coconut tree <br> watching ruben having a dilliance with his wife.<br> The other, someone Ruben pulled a gun on, caught stealing bamboo sprouts.<br> No one was ever charged.<br> The spying husband left in the dark of night, a week later.<br> The other still loiters around, with his petty larcenous preoccupations.<br> <font size="+7">187</font><br> <strong>September 11, 2001, I was working one of the Baltimore clinics.</strong><br> The nurse interrupted my charting to tell me a plane hit New York.<br> I rushed to a room to watch a plane hit the second tower.<br> For the next hours and the next days and weeks,<br> mesmerized with unending stream of cascading visuals,<br> consumed with a cauldron of familiar and unfamilair emotions,<br> a profound emptiness, sensing and mourning the loss of something immeasurable<br> and a dreadful realization that terrorism was no longer remote, occasional, improbable.<br> It had a new face., a new rabidness, a frightening resolve.<br> <font size="+7">1<font color="#000000">88</font></font><br> A year later, the caretaker at the Baguio house was murdered. <br> He caught his wife in an affair with a local guy.<br> The story is told, while he was lashing out his pent-up fury on her,<br> his wife's brothers were texted and came to her rescue.<br> He died with seventeen slashes and stab wounds, front and back.<br> I left the country, assured it was an open-and-shut case of homicide.<br> Alas, his family's coffers could not afford the costs of greasing the investigative work <br> and no effort was made to communicate financial needs to me.<br> His death was eventually labelled a "suicide."<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">189</font><br> I must have "returned" when I started builing Pulang Lupa.<br> Although the years divided into blocks of three to six months<br> shuffling between the construction of Pulang Lupa and medicine in Baltimore, <br> the balance was shifting.<br> As Pulang Lupa mushroomed, so did the dreams and visions.<br> There was the promise of a new freedom; the possibilities, exhilarating.<br> Even the art was happening with novel abandon.<br> I thought I could find a balance between a divided existence, <br> but the allure of a life back in the Philippines grew with each visit.<br> In 2001, with hesitance and some sadness, I sold the Fell's Point residence<br> In 2003, I resigned from the the Baltimore clinics,<br> and dismantled a life of some thirty years–<br> from the medicine and the art that defined it,<br> unlinking from friends, lovers and loved ones.<br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">190</font><br> If I knew then what I know now, perhaps I would not have returned.<br> Or maybe, I would have taken a different path on the crossroad. <br> But there were no cystal balls. No card readers.<br> Over the next few years, a pandora's box slowly opened<br> of failures and frustrations, of conflicts and intrigues.<br> Perhaps, it was a mixture of hubris and naivete,<br> and taking on a sundry of challenges that crossed my path,<br> many unfamiliar to my experience and expertise,<br> and reaching out with opportunies and a helping hand<br> becoming the quintessence milking cow.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">191</font><br> In Baltimore, I was quietly referred to by some in the Filipino community as the "brown American"<br> from a social distancing that was misunderstood, perceived as un-Filipinoness, <br> rather than the existence of isolation I have chosen, free from social encumbrances,<br> an inability for idle chatter, an affliction as long ago as my kindergarten days.<br> Now, having returned, much of what I do is labeled as being "too American."<br> I think it's just the lifetime affliction of "one-track-mindedness," <br> fodder to the parent's recurrent amusement and incredulity.<br> But, perhaps, I have become "too" American.<br> Thirty years of cultural immersion can do that,<br> Imbuing my one-track-mindedness imbued with limitlessness and over-the-topness.<br> Yes, perhaps, having become "too" American was what brought me back,<br> taken by the early vision of building a school and the town library,<br> and all that could happen working with my brother Louie.<br> <font size="+7">192</font><br> The many visits, years before finally returning, slowly painted a picture<br> of worsening maladies that plagued the country.<br> Each visit added a patch to the collage of a landscape<br> of political corruption, of social malaise and the suffering <em>masa</em>,<br> seeds of low-grade activism germinating<br> with hopelessly romantic notions of change.<br> There were many nights of animated talks with my brother and sister,<br> lambanog fueling our passions and belief in the future.<br> Louie was confident. <strong>Change is around the corner.</strong><br> The <em>creme de la creme</em> of La Sallites and Ateneans<br> were coalescing into one formidable force of change.<br> I eagerly drank into that cup of megalomanic hope, <br> later, to sadly learn that many of the creme slinkered to the political establishment.<br> Angie's hope was tempered, that change was far from imminent,<br> but possible through the thousands of scattered grass-root efforts.<br> Alas, the creme de la creme is old, balding and dying off.<br> The grass-roots hopelessly unable to mount efforts of measurable change,<br> unable to coalesce against the unyielding powers in the institution of corruption.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">193</font><br> Ricardo is my friend and alter ego. A burgis Manileño <br> who provides me a 101 on certain urban matters of his expertise<br> and ready elucidations on bourgeoise-related current events.<br> He readily criticizes me on my recurring quixotic musings.<br> I am certain I have bored him too many times,<br> talking about the corruption, the elusive change,<br> and the Filipino's disabling inertia.<br> He said: <strong>Duwag ang Filipino. Walang bayag.</strong> (Cowards. No balls.)<br> Perhaps, too stern a pronouncement, an unkind mismeasure.<br> But there are some painful realities to our collectively diminished courage.<br> Centuries of colonialisms have subjugated our collective will.<br> Reduced us to pathologic timidity and resignation.<br> The heroes, few and far between.<br> Delivered from colonization, occupation and oppression<br> by liberators who become the new colonizers.<br> I counter: <strong>7,280 islands. That's the problem.</strong><br> More than geographic separations, it isolates and disconnects,<br> in its wake, a rabid regionalism that dilutes and divides the collective will.<br> and prevents a true masa movement.<br> Also, we don't have a bellicose streak in our DNA. <br> In more than 300 years of Spanish rule, there were only three battles won.<br> The first was Lapu-Lapu's. <br> The other two were more then 300 years later.<br> Not turn-the-tide victories.<br> No, we not a warring people.<br> It's more than the thousands of islands and thousand of miles that separate.<br> <font size="+7">194</font><br> Why are we so corrupt? Inevitably, conversations lead to that question.<br> We have talked it to death. <br> The contradictions. Most Catholic, most corrupt.<br> Is it the easy confessional cleansing of corruption<br> and the absolution by penance? <br> How did we get this way?<br> Some say it was started way back to the Spanish colonization.<br> Some say it's the Chinese.<br> Some dates it to Quirino's golden arinola.<br> Of course, Marcos and Company redefined it.<br> What came before and after them.<br> The math is staggering.<br> It has been said, more than 65 to 70 centavos of every pesos<br> goes to the coffers of corruption.<br> Ricardo said: <strong>If not more.</strong><br> <font size="+7">195</font><br> When Erap got convicted of plunder, there was a collective sigh of relief.<br> People said <strong>It's about time</strong>. . <strong>We have to set an example</strong>. . <strong>We have to start somewhere</strong>. . . <br> <strong>It sends a lesson and a message</strong>. . . <strong>Politicians will start thinking twice</strong>. . . <br> <strong>That's good. Someone high up</strong>.<br> I asked <strong>Based on the definition of plunder, <br> who are the politicians, in the past 30 years, who are not guilty of plunder?</strong><br> Salonga. Tañada. Pelaez. Joker Arroyo. Diokno. . . Five fingers. . . <br> Um. . . Rene Sagisag? . . . Six fingers. <br> A short list, not easy to expand.<br> <font size="+7">196</font><br> Of course, greed and corruption are not unique to Philippine politics.<br> It is generic to most third-world democratic systems, <br> with power achieved only with unavoidable indebtedness,<br> reimbursed through cronyism, nepotism,<br> the countless political sleight-of-hand ways applied to pork and plunder,<br> and the myriads of ways policies are reshaped for the benefit of the few.<br> What is unique is the heartlessness and the absence of sophistication and shame.<br> Nothing is safe from the leeching and the bleeding.<br> It happens off the top as the monies get disbursed <br> for infrastructure, education, healthcare–roads, books, medicines.<br> I asked someone who won a recent local election.<br> <strong>What is your program? Malinis ba?</strong><br> His reply, immediate: <em><strong>Babawiin muna.</strong></em><br> Incredible millions are spent in getting elected.<br> It would take many lifetimes of political service to get it back.<br> But through pork and plunder and political machinations of corruption<br> one gets in back, and much much more, in less than a term of office.<br> The incomparable ROI of the business of politics.<br> <font size="+7">197</font><br> And the populace has long resigned to this reality of Philippine life.<br> Corruption is its other original sin.<br> For the burgis, it is what it is. An immutable fact of life in this country.<br> Many of them, independent of its machinations,<br> While some are gears to the machineries of corruption.<br> The middle class are making do.<br> Many surviving through one of many economic diasporas.<br> Both yearn for a change.<br> Sadly, they sing the familiar chorus: <br> <strong>Not in our lifetime.</strong><br> Sharing in the feeling that there is no alternative to the reigning rule of the corrupt<br> and that the elections, rather than a democratic instrument of choice or change<br> do nothing but provide a perpetuation of the corrupt status quo.<br> A musical chair of corruption.<br> <font size="+7">198</font><br> The <em>masa</em> are afflicted with a more profound hopelessness.<br> Long resigned to the impossibility of change.<br> Not even in the next lifetime.<br> They sing parts of the same chorus:<br> <strong>Lahat magnanakaw. . . Wala namang ipapalit. </strong><br> (They are all thieves. . . They are all the same.)<br> Their voice is scattered, regionally diluted.<br> Their protestations barely audible whimpers.<br> Their collective outrage never threatening to the ruling powers.<br> Or, collectively threatening, albeit short-lived, only when called upon<br> as the lumpenproletariat to provide noise, number and decibel<br> for the recurrent oppositional protests, marches and coup d'etats attempts.<br> Yet it is the <em>masa</em> vote that determines elections outcomes.<br> And they are feted to a campaign circus <br> replete with same-same predictable promises of change<br> with busloads doses of celebrities and entertainment.<br> They know too well the futility of hope and change.<br> Votes are sold for the half sack of rice or better handout.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">199</font><br> Once, I waxed romantic about change and possibility.<br> Decrying the dreadful state of education.<br> The dreadful decline of English proficiency.<br> I suggested calling upon the retiring and returning diaspora,<br> that population so rich with its doctors, nurses, engineers and scientists<br> their incredible knowledge and abilities destined for oblivion and senility.<br> I pondered the possibility of them dedicating and donating<br> one or two years of their retirement years to teaching<br> in their school or province of choice.<br> Who needs the Peace Corp with this endless supply of talent?<br> Ricardo smiles and says<br> <strong> Nice thought. Go ahead, write about it. See if anyone listens.</strong><br> <font color="#0000FF" size="+7">200</font><br> There is never a lack of talk, testosterone- and alcohol-fueled, likely,<br> of a coalition between the bourgeoisie, the military and their "chosen leader."<br> with the cast of opportunist angels of change who will star <br> in this dream team of a revolution. <br> Talk and passion, with the longevity of a hangover.<br> Alas. . . I join the ranks of those who have resigned to the impossibility of change.<br> To the realities that burden the possibility of change.<br> Everything is too corrupt<br> and corruption so deep.<br> with the populace silenced by timidity, conditioned to subservience.<br> The rabid regionalism. Islands that isolate.<br> The waters that distances and further dilutes the collective passion.<br> A democracy mired in the detritus and excrement of the corrupt.<br> No heroes in sight.<br> No mechanisms for change.<br> There is nothing in the immediate landscape.<br> I have ceased waxing lyrical for change.<br> <strong>Yes. . . Not in our lifetime. </strong><br> <font size="+7">201</font><br> I chose the province over the city.<br> I have wondered where returning would have taken me<br> if I chose Manila over the rurality of Tiaong.<br> The urban possibilities of art or medicine, or simply, for idling away.<br> with its more bohemian possibilities, the urban offerings of art and culture<br> plus readily accessible niches for doses of intellectualizations.<br> But Tiaong seemed the natural choice.<br> Especially after the failure with Baguio,<br> the allure of its culture and eternally pleasant weather<br> speedily diminished by the difficult and constraining regionalism<br> of the Ilocanos and the varied tribal cultures.<br> Tiaong was birthplace, familiar and pure Tagalog.<br> And there was already five years spent buidling Pulang Lupa.<br> I was already half-immersed in the its culture.<br> Despite the mounting frustrations, I chose to stay.<br> <font size="+7">202</font><br> Pulang Lupa is the microcosm of many small towns,<br> seasonally agricultural, at the mercy of unpredictable typhoons and El Niños.<br> In between, the farmers survive on their second trade,<br> competing with carpenters and masons who depend on it as sole craft.<br> Too often, the harvest is unable to provide the basic needs during the dry season.<br> The cow or carabao or gun is sold.<br> On dire times, a 5-6 loan is taken, paid at 10 percent a month.<br> Sometimes, meals diminsh to twice a day. <br> Often it's rice and dried fish, or sardines.<br> There's no miracle of loaves and fishes.<br> An old man I was treating for hypertension told me:<br> <strong>Many times, it's just rice and salt or <em>patis</em>.</strong><br> I've heard that so many times<br> Early one, I was amused by what I thought was an exaggeration of their needs.<br> But I have seen it too many times.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">203</font><br> Many children go to bed hungry.<br> Some infants are weaned off from milk at 6 or 8 months,<br> feedings substituted with <em>"am</em>," sweetened rice water.<br> The children are familiar with worms,<br> pulling it out of their butts, occasionally coughing it up.<br> Many are weaned off the care and watch of parents too early,<br> to join the community of children with whom they share the same plight, <br> too young and innocent to understand the whys of their stories,<br> and the shrunken circumference of their future lives.<br> But today, they play to their hearts' delight,<br> endlessly performing, posing, singing and dancing.<br> Rich in street smarts, so wanting in parented wisdom,<br> many sharing the reality and tragedy of ignorance.<br> Education is not a right. It is the privelege of the burgis and middle class.<br> Many never make it past elementary education.<br> Of those who manage through high school,<br> few can afford a college education.<br> <font size="+7">204</font><br> The Pulang Lupa Foundation was established. <br> With Leila's help, we set up a scholarship and educational assistance program.<br> The foundation graduated a small number into professional lives.<br> Also, provided assistance for day-care needs, <br> elementary and high school tuitions, books and school supplies.<br> Beyond educational projects, built a <em>tuklong</em> for a Lusacan village,<br> youth activities, a short-lived art club and a marching-band.<br> Gratis medical consultations and free medicines.<br> Deworming the children of their familiar squiggly infestations.<br> Providing financial support and loans for seasonal plantings.<br> Grass roots efforts in the boondocks.<br> <font size="+7">205</font><br> Some days I felt like a "mayor" of Pulang Lupa.<br> I'd wake up to find eight to ten people waiting,<br> Always, they come unannounced,<br> my availability known through the rural grapevine.<br> A parent with a son or daughter asking for a scholarship.<br> A farmer asking for financing on a seasonal planting.<br> Someone selling a carabao, horse or billy goat.<br> Someone with an emergent need, selling a gun.<br> Someone offering a price for a coconut or banana harvest.<br> Or asking a loan or seeking employment.<br> A medical consultation or a second opinion<br> or medical samples for a prescription need.<br> And in-between, they shared the details of their lives.<br> too easily, perhaps, weaving them in the so many stories to break your heart.<br> <font size="+7">206</font><br> But as there were stories that saddened, there were stories that angered.<br> As many showered us with praises, many stole behind our backs.<br> Many padded expenses, faked and doctored receipts.<br> Some parents and students exaggerated their needs and impoverishment<br> to better qualify for educational assistance.<br> One who said he would take a bullet, repaid us with thievery, dishonesties and lies.<br> Crops are harvested on the sly, banana trees hewn down,<br> trees hacked down for firewood.<br> Electrical lines cuts down, five separate times, for the underground rural metal market.<br> I heard it so many times –<br> <strong>Dahil sa kahirapan. </strong><em>Because we're poor.</em><br> But many times, it was because it was just easier than working.<br> After so many umpteen times, you sadly see a culture of dishonesty.<br> Some draw on their rural brand of twisted philosophy<br> saying their thievery is no different than the politicians'.<br> I made a small rural-based survey, one question.<br> <em>Given the opportunity, how many would steal or alter receipts</em>?<br> My caretaker said <strong>Six out of ten</strong>. <br> And she's been caught with one hand in the cookie jar.<br> Others said <strong>Eight to ten out of ten</strong>.<br> To the one who said ten, I asked<em> Including you?</em><br> He immediately parried <strong>No! No! I mean nine.</strong><br> <font size="+7">207</font><br> I could not completely retire from medicine.<br> In Tiaong, although the albularyos and the alternative modalities reigned supreme,<br> patients would still come seeking consulations.<br> Cases that have to failed to respond to the local healers' treatments<br> with a <em>bulong</em> or <em>orasyon</em> and a motley of herbal concococtions,<br> or failed to respond to their self-medicating of pharmaceuticals.<br> Some cases come to my attention through the efficient grapevine,<br> grossly mismanaged or worsening despite prescribed therapies, <br> I would summon up or make the occasional housecall.<br> The hold of folklore is often so established in their concepts of disease–<br> <em>duwendes, kulam, balis, usog, pasma</em>.<br> To deconstruct it is a time-consuming, if not impossible, endeavor.<br> I continue to try merging the science of my medicine with their folklore of their beliefs.<br> <font size="+7">208</font><br> There is an absence of traditional health care.<br> Yet, they survive their sundry of maladies <br> with folkloric remedies, prayers and tincture of time.<br> The more serious illnesses make it to traditional consultations,<br> but too often, the treatments are never pursued,<br> the work up and surgeries to costly, the prescriptions unaffordable.<br> Long-term maintenance medications are inexistent.<br> And when the choice is buying medicines or food on the table,<br> It is a no-brainer.<br> Also, I have wondered many times at their rural hardiness<br> despite the utter absence of nutritional guidelines, <br> with the excesses of the salty and fatty,<br> they survive into relative longevity.<br> is it the freshly picked roots, leaves, tubers, fruits and vegetables<br> that grow in the wild or robinhooded off the rich?<br> The absence of urban stress?<br> The bucolic simplicity of their lives? <br> The credo of their existence?<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">209</font><br> Medical care is a privelege of the burgis and middle class.<br> But for many of them, it is still crapshoot. Priveleged crapshoot.<br> Medicine is commerce first, art and compassion a distant second and third.<br> Ka-ching medicine.<br> Many self-labeled specialists attempt specialty medicine, <br> while many specialists dabble into the complexities of internal medicine, <br> ignorance winging through the conundrums with countless consultations.<br> I have witnessed its appalling ministrations with my mother's final years,<br> of dreadful inattention, glaring omissions, terrible mismanagements.<br> And later, in countless stories from kin and friends<br> and the incredible inefficiences revealed from the reviewing of charts.<br> I commented to a doctor, asked why it was so.<br> He said: <strong>It is what it is. Go back to medicine. Start a revolution.</strong><br> <font color="#FF0000" size="+7">210</font><br> It was a tempting challenge, with time-constrained, if not impossible, goals.<br> Still, my ego did imagine taking up the challenge, making a difference.<br> For a minute, maybe, less.<br> It would require a deconstruction of the way we think,<br> move beyond long established barriers of reasoning.<br> The "art of medicine" is an abstract confluence of knowledge, intuitiveness,<br> and the ability to ask, to extract the clues and the mundane,<br> with time to listen and time to connect-the-dots.<br> But the malady is many layers deep.<br> It is not just bringing the art into medicine.<br> Good medicine is difficult when the business of medicine<br> tries to cram as many patients with 10-minute visits.<br> Jiffy-lube medicine.<br> I remember a visit I accompanied my mother to.<br> A 12-minute of a comedy show where the doctor<br> spent most of the time going through my mother's thickened chart<br> nodding on and off, uh-huh, um. . . <br> <strong>Oh, yes. . . um. . you have a pacemaker.</strong><br> I wanted to jump over the desk and wring the fucker's neck.<br> Oh, yes. It is a malady many layers deep,<br> in a profession sorely lacking in censure,<br> serving an unquestioning public subservient to the demigodly pronouncements of their healers.<br> <font size="+7">211</font><br> Kaching medicine is not just an urban malady.<br> The boondocks are also recipient to the dark side of the business of medicine.<br> A pregnant caretaker, her pregnancy seemingly magnified by obesity<br> decided to deliver in a clinic setting, hurried to the next town<br> and was referred to the next town's clinic,<br> where she was asked to fork out thirty thousand pesos for an emergency ceasarean.<br> In increasing labor pains, she rushed to the provincial hospital, <br> barely making it, delivering vaginally with great ease and great economy.<br> <font size="+7">212</font><br> It was a challenge I did not take on. <br> I think another choice was made early on at the start of Pulang Lupa's construction.<br> The daily kilometer walks to-and-fro the peak <br> were interrupted countless times by the flora along the winding footpaths,<br> I started making colored pencil sketches of the many nameless flowers.<br> There were names for the plants common in village life and healing folklore.<br> The rest were simply clumped into three names –<br> <em>damo</em> (weed), <em>baging</em> (vine) and <em>halaman</em> (plant).<br> The villagers were eager teachers to my ignorance and interests.<br> Soon enough they were sharing their how-to on plants.<br> Leaves chewed and spit on freshly circumcised wounds.<br> Or leaves pounded, decocted, infused, heated, oiled for sundry uses.<br> Soon, I became the avid listener to stories of their fascinating world<br> of elves and earth dwellers, the kapre, tikbalang and the white lady,<br> spells and counterspells, anting-antings, <br> the superstitions and the creatures that inhabit their world<br> and the their belief system that rules life, health and death.<br> It is a world wonderfully familiar, from meandering childhood memories<br> that spring to life, in vivid and colorful details.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">213</font><br> Soon, I embarked on a study of Philippine alternative medicine.<br> A compilation and fascination that continue to consume much of the days<br> fueled by an obsessive one-track-mindedness<br> Interviewing countless people–the villagers, hilots, albularyos, <br> farmers, jeepney drivers, carpenters <br> and anyone and everyone who had a story or snippet of folklore medicine to share.<br> There were countless hikes, many hills and little mean mountains,<br> seashores, marshes, open fields, <br> knocking on doors, intruding inside fenced gardens.<br> So many came out to help, to answer a question, provide a name,<br> or offer a plant story of folklore.<br> And later, the countless hours sorting out the clutter of info <br> and tweaking the digital images, uploading into cyberspace<br> working into the early hours of morning, <br> until cerebral crowding and weariness force me to shutdown.<br> Many years into the compilation and more than 500 medicinal plants later,<br> I have wondered many times: <strong>Is this worth it?</strong><br> And asked myself: <strong>Is anyone reading this?</strong><br> <font size="+7">214</font><br> But there are enough emails that have given thanks for the effort,<br> students and teachers who have strayed into the website.<br> And many who were seeking from the compilation an alternative cure<br> for a desperate need or seeming hopeless situation.<br> Some see it as "advocacy," someone as "legacy," <br> emails showering with praise and gratitude<br> that nudge me out of doldrums and inertia.<br> Picker-uppers, I call them. They justify the madness in the effort.<br> So, in the end, I have become the accidental teacher.<br> <font size="+7">215</font><br> Tears come easy.<br> Sad movies. <br> Or in the middle of singing a song, a line breaking through.<br> A few times, an accidental melody from the radio.<br> Once a plaintive violin piece suddenly bringing me to tears.<br> One, I tracked down the title from a radio station that played it.<br> Waited two weeks for the CD to arrive, <br> only to listen to it, passionless and uninspired.<br> There were also those violent tearful episodes, since the mid-eighties,<br> recurring every three or four years, lasting an hour to three hours.<br> From out of nowhere, sudden, paroxysmal, cleansing, cathartic.<br> This is violent tearful sobbing.<br> The first time it happened, it was quite scary.<br> As the episodes became familiar, I would manage a laugh between sobs.<br> It would cease as suddenly as it starts, to leave me severely exhausted.<br> I have pondered the whence.<br> Medicine? The dying? The deaths?<br> An incarnate, restless, surfacing from some obscure niche within? <br> Or the countless minutiae of life's experiences <br> breaking down the frail barriers of memories, opening floodgates of emotions.<br> They seem to have gone.<br> None since I have returned.<br> <font size="+7">216</font><br> <strong>August 1, 2009, </strong><br> Cory Aquino passed away. <br> <strong> November 2009.</strong><br> Pacquiao beat Cotto to a pulp; the world celebrates a boxer; the country, a hero.<br> CNN's hero of the year is a Filipino: Efren Peñaflorida for his Kariton Klassroom.<br> Then, the Mindanao massacre.<br> <font size="+7">217</font><br> Christmas 2009, with the inevitable December blues. <br> It still came, the inexplicable dark cloud of depression.<br> Seasonal, recurring, mild, manageable with its predictable end.<br> Still . . . <br> I thought it was the cold Baltimore Decembers,<br> the barrenness of the wintry landscapes<br> the shortening light and lengthening dark of the days<br> and the long and glittery commerce of Christmas.<br> Here, it still came, and I waged a battle with the seasonal Scrooge within.<br> On the 23rd, the villagers came up, sixty-some, young and old,<br> for the annual event of gift-giving, usually of food baskets<br> and used clothes, most almost new, <br> some worn once or twice, or grown out of by kids.<br> This year the clothes were sent by Leila, collected from her California friends.<br> four big boxes filled with clothing and shoes.<br> The big draw was sweaters and jackets, given out to squealing delights,<br> so timely for the unusual chill of the December days.<br> From the grapevine, I heard how so many were proudly parading<br> up and down the village paths, showing off their colorful hooded jackets.<br> For many days, villagers came up, asking if there were any left.<br> Many said it was the best thing they got for Christmas.<br> <font size="+7">218</font><br> Christmas eve, I drove to Manila, the car filled up<br> with small bags filled with food and toys.<br> The streets were deserted, except for homeless people, street kids and panhandlers,<br> people rummaging through early holiday debris, children caroling, discordant and desperate,<br> hookers looking for a last-minute commerce to add to their feasting table.<br> all searching for a piece of their Christmas.<br> I handed out some bags, as I, too, was hoping to find my Christmas.<br> Christmas day, I drove around deserted avenues,<br> in a snail's pace, discovering the sidewalks,<br> freed from the curtain of traffic and urban bustle and hustle,<br> and the street people enjoying the quiet of their make-do homes<br> of sidewalk concrete and cardboard walls.<br> On the red lights, the beggars came up, in surprising droves,<br> mostly young gaunt mothers, with infants clinging,<br> in wrapped in colorful but tattered garbs.<br> Muslims, Badjaos from Mindanao, referred to as palao or lumaan,<br> God-forsaken, oppressed, dispersed by desperation<br> seeking day-to-day existence in the commerce and charity of red lights.<br> A surreal Christmas day, handing out bags to non-Christians.<br> <font size="+7">219</font><br> So, where does this story end?<br> Is there another adventure or crossroad to insert before these last chapters?<br> Many stories meander the sulci where memories dwell.<br> Some, long forgotten, suddenly, surprisingly surfacing.<br> Some stories beg to be written, but the may cause anguish to some.<br> There is no autobiographical megalomania in this effort.<br> The writing has genesis from the laughter elicited <br> from some of the stories of early childhood and adolescence.<br> Friends and kin said I should write them down.<br> Surely, the funny and the laughter lessened as I grew older</font><br> <font face="Arial">But it was always there.<br> A prescription I have always handed out.<br> Try to have one rollicking tearful good laugh a day.<br> Every surly patient was a challenge<br> to get them to laugh, or at least smile, before they left.</font><font face="Arial"><br> <font color="#0000FF" size="+7">220</font><br> There were loves that sustained, that nurtured,<br> that graced my life with all its wonderful complexities<br> and countless moments of passion and pleasure,<br> and as often, countless moments of pain and anguish.<br> The wonderment of its beginnings and the suddenness of its endings.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">221</font><br> There are no children, no family in the story,<br> in the many crossroads and turns taken<br> in the many decisions and choices made.<br> Perhaps it was the recurrent need for isolation.<br> The unusual capacity for and need of aloneness.<br> The inexplicable ways of life as I chose it.<br> I have wondered where the story would have gone<br> if there were children, if there was a family.<br> A different life. A different story.<br> <font color="#000000" size="+7">222</font><br> Maybe, the story ends quietly, without a culminant event.<br> Unlike the book of fiction, the remaining pages thinning<br> as the plot predictably orchestrates into its suspenseful or sorrowful climax.<br> Maybe, as the days wind down or as the idle time increases,<br> I could set out to do some of the things I have never done,<br> like learn how to swim and roller skate.<br> Or maybe, come to another crossroad or pick up another benign adventure or two.<br> Ricardo has talked about a top-ten burger drive across the U.S.<br> A perilous hyperlipidemic gastronomic odyssey.<br> Or, maybe. . . just do the next 500 plants.<br> Or, maybe. . .airstream into the sunset.<br> <br> </font></p> <hr noshade id="Line"> <table width="333" border="1" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor="#000000"> <tr> <td width="322"><div align="center"><font face="Arial"><a href="Salmagundi.html"><img src="../BUTTONS/SalmagundiButton.jpg" width="139" height="32" border="0"></a></font></div></td> </tr> <tr> <td><div align="center"><font face="Arial"><a href="index.html"><img src="../Graphics/SXRoundLogo.jpg" width="82" height="78" border="0"></a></font></div></td> </tr> <tr> <td><div align="center"><font face="Arial"><strong><font color="#000000"><a href="index.html"><font color="#FF0000" size="-1">HOME</font></a> <font size="-1"> • <font color="#0000FF"><a href="Search.html">SEARCH </a></font> • <a href="Email.html"><font color="#339900"> EMAIL</font></a></font></font></strong></font></div></td> </tr> </table> </blockquote> </blockquote> </blockquote> </blockquote> </blockquote>