Pathology

“IT is a good thing that time is a light, because so much of life is mumbling shadows and the future is just silence and darkness.”

It was an odd thing to hold after the recent weeks: a book left for me by a friend who came for a visit and went home again to Peru. I did not expect to come home until my mother fell sick. I did not expect my friend nor his book, which opens with the quoted line.

I realize again how many things happen that we did not expect. Would we use all our powers to avoid something that we know now happened if we had such powers?

For answers, I found myself reading Paul Theroux’s memoir of his friendship with V.S. Naipaul, “Sir Vidia’s Shadow”.

Naipaul is a better writer but I prefer Theroux as a human. Naipaul’s fiction and nonfiction surfaced the alienation of the colonized subject from the native culture. For these “suppressed histories” of colonial displacement, he was awarded the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Naipaul is difficult to read because while inimitable in the craft, he saw the Global South in terms of the imperialist lens of the “Third World,” a messy soup of maladies and burgeoning catastrophes. On paper and in life, Naipaul was as abusive to women as he was of Third World “victims”.

Theroux is a peripatetic American, writing about ordinary lives in Argentina (“The Old Patagonian Express”) and China (“Riding the Iron Rooster”) without sweeping judgment or fake compassion.

Writers are notoriously quick to give and take offense. So a “literary friendship,” specially when it spans 30 years and five continents, fascinates. As the book blurb goes, “Sir Vidia’s Shadow” is a “double portrait of the writing life” told by Theroux of the “beginning, middle, and end” of that “most fragile of alliances” with Vidia, as Naipaul was called.

Reading the book at my mother’s hospital bedside, I see parallels in the passions moving our lives. Pathology, the study of disease, is rooted in “pathologia,” which for the ancient Greeks meant the “study of passions”.

Achromobacter xylosoxidans. When the infectious disease consultant first pronounced the culprit causing my mother’s infection, I found myself watching her mouth and imagined I was a contestant at a spelling bee. How does one spell a word that one cannot imagine?

I turned to online medical journals but came no closer to understanding this unexpected stranger. And then I opened Theroux’s pathology of friendship: “… you hardly know the oddness of life until you have lived a little. Then you get it. You are older, looking back…

“I see it all clearly. I remember everything.” The path of disease is the path of our passions anger fear regret love.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 29, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Haze

IN my imagination, the world will not end in cold or fire but dust.

Nearly each day, I cross a bridge to go to the city to visit my 80-year-old mother. The sun has yet to rise when I cross the bridge; the disc’s ascent is at its highest when I return by that bridge.

One day, the sun wasn’t there. Or it was lurking in the haze that originated from Indonesian wildfires and spread by the Southwest monsoon, reported Wenilyn B. Sabalo in SunStar Cebu last Sept. 19.

The greyish sky blanketing the cityscape didn’t merit even a blink from me until my mother took a sudden chill while undergoing dialysis.

A long-time diabetic prone to fluid overload that causes respiratory difficulties, Mama recently began hemodialysis (HD) to reduce the excess fluids accumulating in her lungs. One moment we were chatting while she was being prepped for her HD session; in less than an hour, she vomited twice and required emergency measures to improve her access to oxygen.

As phrased by medical jargon, “respiratory system disorders” are “standard complications” in “end-stage renal disease” patients undergoing hemodialysis.

For personal protection, a mask, particularly the N95 facemask, is prescribed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to protect the wearer from liquid, dust, and other airborne contaminants.

N95 refers to the industry-tested capacity of a respirator or facemask to filter out “at least 95 percent of very small (0.3 micron) test particles,” according to the U.S. FDA.

Masks became newsworthy after the Department of Health suggested its use for the protection of “toddlers, the elderly, those with allergies, and those with respiratory illnesses” in the haze covering parts of Metro Cebu, reported SunStar Cebu.

The daily also reported that the Environmental Management Bureau 7 recently conducted the particulate matter (PM) 2.5 test, which found “unhealthy” levels in Metro Cebu of the dust “particle measuring 2.5 micrometers in diameter or about three percent the diameter of a human hair”.

What can be more vital than breathing? Communication.

Mama and many of her HD “classmates” wear masks, haze or no haze. Yet, my talkative mother often lowers her mask when she chats with us, doctors, nurses, and orderlies. She singlehandedly breaks the FDA injunction that facemasks should have “very close facial fit” to achieve “very efficient filtration of airborne particles”.

Isolation and silence are the steep cost of infection-control.

Yet, in the subdued, energy-sapping atmosphere of the renal center, where the whirring of machines interposes more often than the human voice, my mother’s voice is a silver thread illuminating each moment, haze or no haze.

[Photo: snapdeal.com]


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 22, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Kachubong

AND then there was one.

In stories about quests, going to the mountain focused on the solitary self. It did not matter how many persons made the journey or if the traveler went with a guide.

Only the individual goes to the mountain. Only a person returns from it.

Or perhaps I misread the tales. One person enters the mountain; another emerges from it.

After about an hour, our group recently crisscrossed from the Poblacion of Dalaguete to sitio Talayong in the town of Alegria, a journey that connects the southeastern to the southwestern side of Cebu, the coast to the uplands, the known to the unknown.

We had dinner at a roadside eatery that had changed its menu and setting over the decades but still had a guard/receptionist who missed a tooth or two but not an opportunity to chortle while explaining the difference between plain chopsuey and Sun Yat-sen chopsuey (answer: the ham bits that gave away a taint of decadence in the vegetarian mishmash).

It had begun to drizzle when we began the ascent, the wind and the rains whipping and shaking the canopies of the tallest sentinels that towered above the dark, watching mass looming above us by the time we mounted to about 600 meters above sea level.

After we made the crossing, we debated the wisdom of choosing the Mantalongon route to reach our host. The husband, an old hand in these mountain ranges, preferred crossing Nug-as in Alcoy to Lepanto, Alegria, but caution prevailed over adventure as we would make the journey at night.

Our host said that the sparsely dispersed households lull travelers until they are approached by strangers along the Nug-as route for handouts. Nightfall, said our host, is not a good time to refuse strangers who will remember and make sure you remember as well that refusal when you lose your way and have to double back on the road.

In these times, few mountains remain virgin territories, unreached by motorcycles. A single-lighted Cyclops transporting a returning resident disgorged by a late bus from the city sometimes breaks the fog-wreathed stillness and silence.

Aside from droning invasions of the “habal-habal (passenger motorcycle),” clusters of the cone-shaped “bukag (basket),” woven from unbreakable rattan to hold as much as 100 kilos of lettuce, pechay or sayote balanced on the forehead and back of a farmer, huddle by the dark roadside like jaded commuters awaiting the trucks of middlemen that dawn brings.

I was beginning to think the old tales had to be rewritten when I saw the first kachubong dripping silver in the crosshairs of the car lights. Flute-shaped bells of the mountain, the flowers toll a note for this traveler: never does the same person return.


[Photo: Roy S. Tabada]


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 15, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Queer peaks

BRIBES for the ferryman of the dead.

The obol is the coin the ancient Greeks placed on the eyes and the mouth of the dead to keep them dead.

I thought of Charon’s obol when, during a recent mammography, laboratory technicians taped metal discs on my nipples, my first experience as a mammogram veteran since I started taking this annual procedure to monitor a lump in my breast discovered more than four years ago.

The procedure entails the positioning of one breast at a time between two plates, which compress and take an image used for screening for or diagnosing possible cancer. Since one breast mass had been aspirated years ago and required the regular monitoring, I have become a veteran at donning on a robe that opens in front to make it easy for the mammo technician to take one breast at a time and position this on the plate like a slab of meat I might consider buying and grinding for all-lean-meat patties to munch on while binge-watching horror movies at home.

This particular hospital, though, followed different protocols from the other one where I usually had the mammograph. Instead of a dour technician who splashed alcohol on her hands after positioning each tit (shudder my udders, could have been her mantra), two young women gently coached me to moving this way or that so each breast could have her best angle taken for the radiologist to read and interpret.

“You are so courageous,” praised one of the nice ladies. So unlike the other woman who wept copiously, observed her colleague. I wondered why the lady was reduced to tears when the plates clamped with a grinding sound like teeth gnashing as I screamed and forgot to ask the question.

To endure previous mammos, I taught myself to think of language. Take “abreast”. The word means “side by side and facing the same way”.

Human breasts are attached from birth like twins that yet grow estranged. Has one breast ever looked at the other to comment on the weather or the putrid state of politics? Yet ours is a culture that ogles breasts obsessively when these are cut off and displayed like specimens or pop trophies.

The mammogram room then is a disguised confessional. It is not pain that I flinch from but the discomforts of self-examination. Charon ferries the boat that takes souls to the underworld. His obol provides the soul sustenance for the journey, as well as prevents it from rejoining the living.

The pleasant ladies forgot to remove the discs taped on my nipples. I peeled away the tape to rejoin the living, feeling I had left behind two strangers holding Charon’s coin.


[Photo source: puebloradiology.com]



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 8, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”