Red

THE GARDEN, at first, was a shortcut, a quicker way to reach the cashier, the labs, the blood bank squirreled behind the bleakest of alleys.

Then I noticed that few took this path: the nurses with their color-coded trays of pills and paraphernalia, the residents in billowing white like avian escapees, the caregivers clutching little grey slips, anxious lest the prescriptions flutter away like the flimsiest of hopes.

For the minute or so it took to saunter through the garden, I avoided the hushed bright corridors where a consultant whispered to stone-faced relatives about a metal heart valve, the shroud on the gurney creaking on its way down to the morgue.

Moving through the hospital maze, I know the corridors by smell more than sight, the odors of disinfection layering over the stream of maladies, an olfactory map to the mysteries of the human body and its infinite ways of disintegration.

This theatricality cultured in hospitals is muted in the garden where life is not tracked by medical doses or accompanied by the clicks and electronic murmurs of life-extending machines. It is reassuring to find the sap at its riotous, its most fecund, flowers hypnotizing butterflies, bees ravishing pollen-sticky stamens, this old soul drunk on sunshine, breeze, the fuzz of grass as unruly as morning-after love.

Certainly the nuns had more pious intentions in creating this oasis. As with plants, we grow more assuredly towards the light when we are firm in our moorings.

To see the connections not just of this organ to that, to dwell on the consequences of desires on mortality, to see in suffering and tribulation the profoundest confirmation of the indestructible and the eternal—our science has yet to catch up with the ancients.

When the Spanish colonizers reached our shores in the 16th century, nutmeg was among the “first drugs” discovered, wrote the priest-scholar Ignacio Francisco Alcina.

Nutmeg trees bled sap like blood; hence, their repute as “blood trees” warding off illness. Much prized was a variety called “doghan” because the natives believed its sap was blood.

Alcina enumerated at least 11 local words rooted in “dugo (blood),” including “dugoon” (the monthly cycle of women), “nakadugo” (blood flowing through the male or female genital), “dinugo” (bleed to death), and “hinugo” (penalty for extracting another’s blood).

The tiny red blossoms in the garden I escape to have no scent. Remembering the tubes coding my mother’s blood (red clamp for the stream leaving her body and blue for the returning flow, she explains), I repeat my own mantra: red blood for oxygenated; purple for deoxygenated. Red now is the new favorite.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 25, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Terminal

SPENDING two consecutive days in a Cebu City private hospital gave me a brainstorm. What if, instead of adding new wings for clinics, the latest in facilities and more parking space, hospitals made space for walking parks, gyms and wellness centers?

What if, instead of ornamentals, pretty rocks and stone angels, trees, herbs and medicinal plants turned hospital gardens into communal green larders where folks can take a cutting or two for their own gardens?

Among community extension workers, this is the wisdom: one’s service is completed when one becomes redundant in people’s lives.

But hospitals never become irrelevant. Step inside and you will be back again. You will return for “regular” visits and become a captured, if reluctant, enrollee for life until death signs the certificate for final release.

In a kid’s mental map of the neighborhood, hospitals represent health. But today’s medical complexes are Byzantine bureaucracies enshrining sickness and pathology.

That must be why many of us go to hospitals only when we absolutely have to. It’s a state of mind created not by the fear of contamination lurking in the unnaturally bright and antiseptic corridors but by the overwhelming certainty that we can only be healthy again as soon as we put miles between us and these edifices dedicated to a dubious god of wellness.

Joining the lunch hour queue at the cafeteria, I wondered at the schizophrenia dissecting hospital culture: posters inside elevators exhorting hygiene and exercise; softdrinks, 24-hour vending machines and skinless longganiza as cafeteria come-ons.

Seeing hospitals through the eyes of an ailing loved one makes me harsh and blinds me to the operating principle behind these institutions: free will. Hospital administrators express this best by a terse sign posted outside elevators: using the stairs is better for your health.

The long line of people that never ebbs outside elevators is my answer: on the drug of free choice, people often choose the easier, but not always the better, way.

Without education, free will is a risk and a threat to us. I realize this as I listen to a nephrologist advise a septuagenarian that dieting should have begun 50 years ago. In my 20s, what occupied my days? Novels, deadlines, a boyfriend; certainly not calorie-counting or busting hereditary curses.

Shouldn’t more kindergarten teachers invite a nephrologist to speak to kids who may not yet even know how to spell the word?

A room full of intelligent, open and curious five-year-olds should be challenging enough for a specialist. Like kids, kidneys come in “terrible twos.” These are shaped like a bean and become no bigger than an adult fist.

“Bones can break,” goes the Internet, “Muscles can waste away and the brain can sleep without risk to life”. But you need the Dynamic Duo kapowing and kablasting their way past all the junk so that we are fine, inside and outside.

That’s a story worth keeping in the annals of childhood. Of course, a hospital stroll can also be as elucidating, specially past the kidney unit and the dialysis room where the patients binge on lechon while their blood is filtered by machines.

But this is hardly education, just free will, frittered away in a setting that beds medical care and wellness like patients on separate cots.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 25, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”