In and out of a hospital, a time to read

For some time now, I haven’t read much at home, and the books I have acquired at the national book fair in September last year must have been wondering why they remain closed. I have been so busy to touch their spine, smell the ink on their pages, much more transport myself to the paradise of knowledge and wisdom that only good books are capable of doing.

The books are scattered all over the house: by my bedside, in the shelves at the toilet, in the shelves in the living room, and on my study table. They silently, patiently wait to be picked up, engaged, and then, if one has more time, tell a story about them.

That was until last week when, at a burst of idle energy, I begun to read again. I had the time. I was off from work for a few days because of an unwanted intruder—a hospital furlough.

I have to credit my having time to read to my appendix, that pesky “accessory organ”—according to my daughter Lara—which was now detached, removed from this world, and more useless than it was when it still protruded from my big intestine.

And to think that just last Sunday, when the doctors at the Manila Adventist Medical Center recommended its excision, I adamantly refused despite the excruciating pain that its inflammation brought to my body. Think of being pricked by a thousand needles when you imagine an appendix about to burst!

My refusal to be operated on—to be relieved of the stomach pain—was based not on a scientific fact. It arose from an eternal remembrance of what my grandfather Urbano used to drill into my head as a child in Sibale, Romblon.

He told me: “Nicon, life is never the same once someone other than the Creator removes something from your physical body.” Then he went on to recite the names of townspeople I all knew who went under the knife, after which they were not the same anymore. Some got worse and weakened; others got old faster; all eventually died.

Such was my fear of medical procedures that when I was in the elementary grades, news of a motorboat coming to our island with a dentist, nurse, or doctor from the faraway provincial capital and sent by public school officials to attend to the health needs of students would send me scampering away to the barrio. I escaped those regular medical visits by inventing all kinds of excuses just to be away from school on the appointed time of their coming. Fortunately, I seldom got sick when I was a child. I maintained a robust body by swimming and eating edible wild fruits and leaves, fresh coconut meat, and raw fish eggs dipped in vinegar.

But on Sunday, I could not escape the inevitable. Twisting in pain, I listened to Dr. Noelvin Bartolome, my long-time physician, explain why I had to undergo an appendectomy. He asked a classmate, Dr. Joseph Melbert O. Gulfan, the surgeon who also dabbled in nature photography and mountaineering, to do the convincing because I had been asking how sure they were my stomach pain indicated a near-bursting appendix.

Dr. Gulfan said appendectomy is a minor surgical procedure. The success technique, he said, is early intervention. The earlier it is, the earlier the recovery, and the earlier I can go back to work. Doctors, I suppose, are salespeople, too. They sell hope and I had to buy it if I were to be alive and continue to be productive.

I narrowed my options between temporarily giving up control over my body so it can recover and the possibility of having an intact appendix but pestering me with pain until it burst and poison my internal organs. The second option will still lead to an operation, anyway, or if not, possibly death.

So I agreed. On Monday, at 10:00 A.M., I was sedated. The sedative was administered intravenously so I didn’t feel the pain of the needle when the anesthesia, which lent the lower half of my body limp and numb, was injected in my spinal column. When I woke up less than an hour later, I heard voices but can’t figure out what they’re saying. I felt a pair of gloved hands already dressing my wound.

That was it; finished, I, still dizzy because of the anesthesia, thought. Later at the recovery room—the transit point between the operating room and my hospital room (hell and paradise?)—my wife, Eireen, whispered to me that Dr. Gulfan showed her my appendix. It was elongated, reddish, and seemed ripe to riot. I asked why she didn’t preserve it. She just smiled.

I was amazed how painless an appendectomy was and how fast one can recover from such an operation. I stayed a day more at the hospital, reading and watching TV, because I was bored and unable to move freely yet. The next day, I went home and the first thing I did was to position myself at the living room sofa, with a stack of books beside me because I am not allowed yet to do my regular chores, and read. I read, read, read.

Oh, what a joy not to be able to move your body because an appendix you first thought of was useless was removed! How utilitarian it is to have an appendix and then have it excised! It gives one many precious gifts.

One of which is the gift of time. My immobility due to the operation, however short, allowed me to think, to sort out things, and to notice even some parts of the house that I thought were not there because I took them for granted during normal times, such as the busted bulb in the terrace which I fancied to switch on when I arrived home.

It gave me time to read The Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas, a novel about a fascist writer Rafael Sanchez Mazas who, at the close of the final moments of the Spanish Civil War, escaped death when the unknown soldier who should have shot him, did not, and just turned away, after looking into Mazas’ eyes.

As I write this, I am into Francisco Sionil Jose’s Why We Are Hungry, a compilation of the country’s most widely-translated writer’s published essays that are an analytics of our socio-economic and political times and, as in his previous compilation, Why We Are Poor, raise his resonant voice that consistently call for a nationalist revolution.

Next in my reading leisure list is George F. Will’s The Levelling Wind, but that has to wait, I think. I have to re-read Kain Na, The Maya Kitchen’s recipe book which is Eireen’s favorite. It is her birthday over the weekend and Lara and Lilac have been badgering me to cook for them a dinner. I shall oblige, with or without appendix. I have time. Do you?