UP
Prep 1966This story is true. Names have been changed to protect the privacy of those concerned.
hello dearies,
i guess i will
have to make this the final installment of my
ramblings, as i have just been given the clean bill of
health by my doctors
to give my office a try for a week starting this monday.
but they will still
have to continue to monitor my blood pressure, blood
sugar, food intake, b.
movements and my general activities, with and without
medicines, and under
office and home conditions. so, manny and butch, get
ready to heave your
sighs of relief!
dr.joe junks the n.p.o. diet
the whole of
tuesday, the day before my operation, doctors,
residents, interns and nurses as usual parade in and
out my room, all of
them talking about putting me on an n.p.o. diet starting
midnight. the first
doctor i ask what n.p.o. stands for gives me latin sounding
words, so i
don't bother the other doctors about the same. at 4 a.m.
of wednesday, THE
day, i wake up coughing and would continue to cough for
two more hours to
the consternation of my private nurse, who my clem, ehem,
got for me so
nanay will not have to assign me some pasay boys. so
i cough and i cough on
the outside chance my doctors would postpone or even
cancel my gall bladder
operation. fat chance. to relieve her of consternation,
i engage my private
nurse in conversation and ask her, in between coughs,
what i did not
understand from my first doctor -- the meaning of an
n.p.o. diet. she gives
me a deep frown and answers me: "NO POOD OBERNIGHT, SIR."
oooh, please put
me back to sleep, even if i have to be brought to the
operating room, pronto!
my second visitor,
after nanay who has to monitor everything for
tatay, is our very own dr. joe, husband of reta tan and
so on. he runs
through the operating procedures with me, my clem, and
of course nanay
--like how at 10:30 a.m. i would be given a dose of demerol
to make me
drowsy; like how at 11 i'll be wheeled to the operating
room and once inside
i'll be administered epidural anesthesia, like what they
give mothers giving
birth, and more demerol that would put me totally asleep;
like how i'll be
inside the operating room for about two hours and for
another three hours i
will have to spend at the recovery room. the slightly-damaged
tenth of my
left brain makes a quick addition and computes i'd be
back in my room by 4
p.m. or give them doctors another hour, say 5 p.m. our
very own dr. joe
assures me the whole team will be there, of course including
me, to monitor
all vital signs, my heart, my blood sugar, my ulcers
and whatever organ
needs monitoring every second on the second, and to finally
staunch the gall
of my stones. just before our very own dr. joe leaves,
father benedict drops
in, showers me with God's blessings and offers me the
communion host. i give
dr. joe a hesitating glance, remembering my n.p.o. diet,
he gives me back a
smiling nod, and i take communion. HE is in me and will
never leave me, even
for an instant.
silhouettes and voices
they did not
have to inject me with a dose of demerol to make me
calm before wheeling me to the operating room (of course
by this time the
demerol must be having its effect on me). at the corridor
the members of the
A-team would one by one present themselves to me. i make
a final request to
our own dr. joe to lead the whole team in prayer before
they start with the
operation. he says i did not have to make the request
because this is
exactly what he does everytime he operates. then they
wheel me into this
dimly lit room. i do not know how and when they administered
the epidural
anethesia and more demerol, but for quite a long while
i could only make out
silhouettes and hear voices of what seems to me a garbage
crew not an A-team
of medical specialists.
i wake
up in a very cold and even darker room (is this how it feels
to be in a morgue). i see a clock overhead which says
6:30 and i hear
somebody ask another body if he can move his feet. after
a while i hear the
same question being asked of another body, so i try to
move my feet. i
couldn't even move any of my toes! this is the start
of two hours of agony,
thinking what happened in the operating room? why have
i not been brought to
my room, this late in the evening? why can i not move
even any of my toes?
after four more bodies are asked to move their feet,
i ask the somebody why
she was asking this of the other bodies, and when she
would ask me the same.
the why, she explains, is to determine if the effect
of anesthesia is
starting to wane which in turn is the signal to send
the body back to his
room. and then she asks me to move my feet. i do. so
, at 8:30 p.m. they
finally wheel me back to my room. the first person i
see outside the
recovery room is my clemmie, who has been patiently waiting,
first, outside
the operating room for five hours, and then, at the recovery
room for
another four hours and thirty minutes or a total waiting
time of nine hours
and thirty minutes; more than my nanay, who, immediately
after i am wheeled
out of the operating room and on seeing the thumbs up
sign of our very own
dr. joe, hurries back to pasay to be the first to give
a blow by blow report
to my tatay.
inventorying my internal organs
i am not to
get a blow by blow report on my operation until way into
midnight of that wednesday when i am visited by the weird
dr. martinez.
perhaps knowing that i wouldn't be able to sleep that
night, this weird dr.
martinez, who dons a bmw, pays me a midnight call. he
taunts me with a
"masakit,ano"? and i taunt him back with an "ito na ba
ang pinaka-masakit
ninyo"? boy, am i wroooong. he touches me ever so lightly
below my right rib
where i was operated on, and i give out a hoooowl that
could have awakened
the entire floor. it is going to be the start of an almost
sleepless day
when i experience and/or imagine physical pain as i have
never felt before,
when any position and every breath i take generates and/or
seems to generate
pain. oh, how the weird dr. martinez relishes the days
to follow, when he,
our very own dr. joe and dr. payawal, my anesthesiologist
and their
batchmate, would be taunting me, their psychiatric case,
back to an early
recovery. how they would make me sit up later this day;
get me out of my bed
and take my first few steps the day after; walk around
the room and go to
the comfort room by myself on the third day and so many
others. how else
could i be back home for our 18th anniversary on january
18, four days after
my operation.
while i could
still bear the pain, i ask the weird dr. martinez why
my operation took oh so looong. it took some four hours
instead of the usual
two hours because of the massive infection of my fraternity-initiated
insides. the inflammation of my gall bladder caused my
liver to inch closer
to the bladder to cushion its contractions and prevent
an untimely rupture.
but due to this lovey-dovey position of my liver and
gall bladder
my doctors had to carefully pry away the bladder from
my liver, so as not to
injure this latter, before they could altogether remove
the bladder,
brother. for some reason or another, the massive
infection also caused more
blood vessels to feed into the infected area and, therefore,
more of these
vessels will have to be cauterized. you miss cauterizing
anyone of these
vessels and the patient risks internal bleeding, but
this will not be my
story. had they not earlier performed endoscopy on me,
clearing my ducts
would have added another hour or two. and six hours under
the knife might
just be too looong and riskeee for a psychiatric case
with tuuuuwelve stress
ulcers which can easily bleed, an elevated blood
sugar, and
high-pertension. can you take in all of these. what i'm
saying to you, butch
and manny, is that mine is a special case and you don't
have to go my way.
so don't be like doy vea, smart ceo and UP High '66,
and start comparing
symptoms. have a check-up. i recommend our very own dr.
joe reyes, husband
of reta tan and so on.
oh, yes the
weird dr. martinez, on the side, asks if it is true what
i said in my medical story that i am just a social
drinker. because my
metabolism is so malakas (tumba na ang kainuman, pwede
pa ako), the demerol
they inject me does not put me totally asleep. at one
point during the
operation, i am supposed to have had a running conversation
with the members
of the A-team. this is when, after having opened me up,
the weird dr.
martinez, to allay my earlier fears about the condition
of my internal
organs, and seeing me half-awake, proceeds to make an
inventory of my
organs. He goes, "EQ,ang liver mo OK, buong-buo".
i go, "aaah"."ang kidneys
mo OK na OK". again, i go, "aaah". "ang pancreas mo,
OK din". and i go,
"aaah" again. "it's like a forest in here, nagdikit-dikit
na itong mga
laman-loob mo. aba, ano ang mga ito? EQ, may mga ovaries
ka"!!! mga
walang-hiyang A-team kuno, pati na singit na nurses,
dinig na dinig ko
nagtatawanan, parang mga basurero.
parang tocino
they take out
from me an almost gangrenous gall bladder which the
weird dr. martinez shows to clem . my clemmie describes
it to me later as
something like an elongated tocino, mamula-mula na may
sunog-sunog na parte
ng taba. she swears never to eat this pampango delicacy,
ever again.
in case you
want to make your own diagnosis like this smart ceo and
UP High '66 brod of mine, the official medical report
certifies that:
"Mabini Pablo,
49 years old, was seen and examined because of severe
RUQ and epigastric pains of
several months duration. He was
diagnosed to have 'chronic calculous cholecystitis and
diabetes
mellitus'. In the wards, he was noticed to be jaundiced
with abnormal liver
function tests. He
underwent an endoscopic retrograde
cholangiopancreatography with sphincterotomy. During
the procedure
it was noted that patient had about 12 stress ulcers
in the first portion of
the duodenum for which a
proton pump inhibitor was administered.
Endocrinologic and cardiopulmonary evaluation were done
and
patient underwent cholecystectomy with excision of thigh
lesion.
Intraoperative findings revealed no
abnormal masses in the
abdominal viscera. There were friable moderate to severe
adhesions between
the
gall bladder, omentum and duodenum which bled easily on lysis.
Gall bladder was inflamed with areas of
ischemia; it contained
several stones".
and so on and so forth.
EQ recuperates
the thursday
after the operation is the most difficult for me. it is
difficult enough just lying down on my bed and even just
to breathe. i
almost go sleepless the entire day except when my sister
buhay (UP Prep'63
and batchmate of former science and technology secretary
william padolina
and trade and industry undersecretary daki fonacier,
which makes them the
second most influential prepian batch in this administration
next to the
batch of jerry barican and you-know-who) puts my head
on her shoulder, cries
and lulls me into a 45-minute nap. i cannot describe
my pain. but just
imagine how our very own dr. joe, later that day, forces
me to sit up,
bending my stomach now with a fresh six-inch incision.
and he goes on to
tell me i have to bear the pain as he will make me get
out of my bed and
walk the next day, and do many other things by myself.
bacause the earlier i
am ambulant the faster my recovery would be. later in
the night i am
transferred to another suite and quadruple-handled into
transfering to
another bed, the mattress of which i insist to be changed
with the mattress
of my original bed, by a pair of dpwh kamineros not nurses
nor interns. the
transfer turns out to be a blessing because i get to
realize that i can bear
the pain, that much of the pain is really in my head,
and that i can get on
quick with my recuperation. on january 18, i am finally
sent home to spend my
18th wedding anniversary with my family. but, of course,
i am on a special
diet of fish and vegetables -- with no salt, no fat,
and no sugar (sa
madaling salita, walang lasa)-- and lots of tablets.
i will work on my
recuperation for 4 to 6 weeks, and in the meanwhile i
get to hassle you with
my ramblings.
one more thing.
before i leave the hospital my columnist-friend art
borjal calls me. i tell him a shorter version of the
story of my gallstones,
and in the january 25 issue of the Philippine Star he
writes:
"Several days ago, the workaholic Undersecretary Mabini 'EQ'
Pablo of the Department of Public
Works and Highways found himself
confined at the UERM Medical Center where he was rushed
after
suffering what must be the most intense stomach pain
he had ever experienced
in his entire lifetime.
The doctors' diagnosis showed that he had
an infected gall bladder and that it had to be removed
because
of some gallstones, which were previously undetected,
had already infected
his digestive
system.
"Since it was his first time to undergo surgery, and a major
one at that, EQ, his family and
friends went through a period of
worry. His blood pressure and blood sugar were both high,
and his
doctors thus had to perform endoscopy, a procedure to
determine if any
gallstones had infected
surrounding organs. At least one
stone was found to have passed through his bile duct,
causing the
infection.
"But then, EQ had nothing to worry about. He was attended
to, in the words of one intern, by an
all-star cast of specialists
at UERM, with Dr. Jose Reyes III, head of surgery, as
team leader. The
other members of the team were Dr. Gabriel Martinez,
surgeon; Dr.Oscar
Cabahug, gastro-enterologist;
Drs. Fidel
Payawal and Eric Nagtalon, anethesiologists; Dr. Norberto
Uy, cardiologist; and Dr. Araceli
Panelo, endocrinologist.
"Dr. Reyes was EQ's scoutmaster during his elementary school
days. He and Drs. Martinez and
Payawal were also batchmates at
UP, graduating from Pre-Med two years ahead of EQ. Dr.
Cabahug, also
from UP, is EQ's fraternity brod, while Dr. Nagtalon
was a high schoolmate.
In other words, all the
members of the medical team had reason to
really assure that EQ's surgery would go well.
"EQ has nothing but praises, not just for all his doctors,
but the UERM staff as well, who
attended to him. He says that
never did he feel their care and attention waver even
for a moment and
even as the normal one-hour surgical procedure stretched
into four hours,
plus another five hours in
the recovery room.
"According to EQ, the level of the UERM doctors' and
staffers' professionalism and commitment
to the well-being
of their patients -- as well as their
meticulousness to details -- is the highest he
has seen anywhere. As
a result, what could have been one of the most traumatic
experiences in EQ's
life
became one of the most enlightening.
"To all those who were one with him in his hours of greatest
need, EQ has the following
message: 'Thank you. I could have
not gone through this without you. You were the angels
the Good Lord
sent to minister to me, to light my way in the darkness,
and it has been
through you that my family
and I felt firsthand His grace and
loving kindness.'"
before i start
to get lucid and run out of my ramblings let me say
goodbye for now, one and all. from the bottom of my heart,
thank you, again,
for your prayers, your visits, your cards, your e-mails,
your calls, your
flowers, your gifts, your thoughts , and everything else.
-the end-
EQ goes abroad!!
(a continuing saga?)
UP
Prep 1966Butch, now you know!
