I am sitting here in a lounge chair just outside the ICU
ward where my father is currently lying in one of the beds. It’s my second night on duty and I have been
waiting for hours for the cardiologist to tell me the 2DECHO test they did to
my father this morning. It’s almost 1
am. The results are in my bag.
Thickened mitral valve leaflet without restriction of motion; mitral annular calcification… Thickened right and non-coronary cusp without restriction of motion; aortic annular calcification… Reversed mitral inflow pattern indicative of Grade I left ventricular diastolic dysfunction… Mild mitral regurgitation… Mild tricuspid regurgitation.
Words that form sentences and that ramble into ribbon of
spells like some witch concocting a curse of some kind. I had to Google every
word to understand the whole shitload of words and piece them together like
some puzzle. I have an idea already of
what my father’s condition is. I just
need to talk to the damn cardiologist. I
can’t blame him – the cardio guy. He
seemed nice and straightforward with somewhat of an affable personality when he
delivered the preliminary prognosis to me at 2 am yesterday. “Your father has difficulty in
breathing… possible solution would be
angioplasty… still need to run some tests… before we can wean him off of the
tubes." His delivery was effortless, with just the right pinch of bedside
manner.
Drinking what probably would be my fifth coffee for the day;
I stare at the electric fan on the ceiling and think of its rotating blades,
and wonder how many times it rotates in a second.
My father is sick.
And I’m here in a hospital waiting room on New Year’s Eve waiting for
the doctor to tell me when they can take off the tube in his mouth. All I could
think about is going home with my father and tell him that he’ll outlive me and
he can be the prophet he always claimed to be when my siblings and I were mere
kids.
I used to hate him, my dad.
Loathed him even. My coming out
party was on 9-11 and I punched a cabinet door just to prove a point. He hated my gay guts. I hated his
philandering gonads (at 63!). I stormed
out of the house that night, stayed with my best friend in another city and
came back home after 6 months when he had a stroke. He survived a fatal
one. He was damn lucky. I had to wipe his ass for one whole
week.
Truth be told as much as I hated my father, I love him in my
own weird and dysfunctional way. We were
dysfunctional to some extent, our family. We’re a Filipino family in the ghetto
with the portrait of the Marcoses in our hallways. He is Catholic by choice, I
think; but his parents were Seventh Day Adventists. And every time he’d be in
one of his saviour moments (those times when he would be thinking that he would
be the new Moses or something), he’d make his children sit in the living room
and proclaim the gospels for hours. We’d
be sitting there, me and my older siblings, looking at him standing in front of
us, one hand holding a very worn out
Bible, the other hand gesticulating while he spurts out the Gospels with
such gusto and bravado like those televangelists we see on TV. He’d be in that mode for hours, thinking of salvation
and rapture, while my mom would be by the kitchen door shaking her head
thinking what a nut job my father was, while me and my siblings would be
thinking of dinner. Anything, but this,
would do. We could eat paper with mayonnaise and we’d be ok. I’m probably not
alone in this, but back then, whenever he was having his salvific moments, I
was thinking or even devising of ways to avoid fire and brimstone that was
about to beset the sofa where me and my brother and sisters sat. I was thinking if I could fake shitting in my
6 year old pants and my mother would save me from Leviticus and
Revelations. My brother and sisters were
prolly thinking of faking a seizure or something. The living room sermon will all come to an
abrupt end when my mother would finally announce dinner. Then we’d go
scrambling to the kitchen and eat as fast as the Marcoses could say
Honolulu. That’s my father, the new
Moses.
I spent this Christmas in our house in Caloocan. The house is different now. The house in 4th Avenue has lost
its old charm. It’s worn out now,
despite the repairs my mother commissioned.
It pretty much looks and even feels like my father’s worn out Bible. Me and my father, we’re tight now. Age (both his and mine) became the catalyst
of our father-son bond. He doesn’t care
that his son is a homosexual. He prolly
doesn’t remember. But my mother tells me
that he knows and he’s ok with it. I can
hug him now, I can even kiss him. He
gets teary eyed whenever I do that. He
never spurts the Gospels like a garden hose but he never fails to give his
fatherly wisdom: “You take care of
yourself… Eat right… Exercise… Stop smoking…
Work hard… “I nod and say the customary yeses and uhums every time he
says these things. He walks with a make
shift cane, made from some polished tree branch with like hundreds and hundreds
of rubber bands on the handle so he can get a better grip of it. From a short distance he did look like Moses
to me.
Three days later, the whole family (including my father’s
siblings) agreed to confine him in the hospital. He had a heart attack at 3 am. I was in my box sleeping and only found out
at 7 in the morning. One of my nieces
left a message on my phone telling me that Tatay was in the intensive care
unit. I closed my eyes and counted
backwards. I was thinking of the last
thing I said to him last Christmas that he’d outlive me… that he’d live to be a
hundred or two.
It’s my second night at the hospital. I told my family that I would be staying with
Tatay till Sunday so I can talk to the doctors. With all the medical jargon
they tell us I didn’t want my mother to have an aneurism just trying to
understand what caused my father’s heart attack. At least I have Google and some episodes of
ER and House for some references. I’ve
only seen him once since yesterday. He
has this tube in his mouth which helps him breathe but it looked like it
hurt. It did, according to the doctors
that’s why they gave him some sedative.
Tatay’s still lucid. He wanted
the tube taken off. He wanted to drink
and he wanted to eat. He wanted to go
home. He prolly misses his old
staff. Like some clichéd line that was
pulled out from some Emmy Award winning series, I told him that we were going
home once he gets well. That he needs to
listen to the doctors and not threaten to punch the nurses (he did according to
Nanay) and that he should not make Nanay worry and that he should not write “I Want To Die” on paper. He was still strong, I said. He was still gonna outlive me (he waved off
his hand at that remark). I held on to
his knee and said those words over and over again. It was effortless in my part. He gestured something, he wanted the blanket
over his legs. My sister and I put
it. I patted his knee. My sister kissed his cheek. I kissed his forehead. Put the customary sign of the cross on his
forehead and told him that we will be outside.
My sister had tears when she went out. I didn’t.
My eyes were dry. Did I want to cry?
Hell yeah. But I couldn’t because
I had to be strong for now. I remember
reading somewhere, or someone telling me or some shit that came in a dream or something that in a room full of
people crying, there’s always somebody mopping the floor.
I remember that story in the Bible, when Moses was holding
the magic staff with his arms outstretched for hours while the Isrealites were
fighting of whoever they were fighting off so that they could pass the desert
and go to the Promised Land and Moses was getting shit tired because his arms
were outstretched for hours and hours.
There was a person helping him, supporting him (I think it was his
brother Aaron or some dude named Joshua) so that the Isrealite army would go for the win. They won.
I need to be that guy for my father right now. I need to be his Aaron and his Joshua and his devil’s advocate for now. I need to
wait and pester the cardiologist to just lay down the cards to us and for the
damn 2DECHO results to be interpreted by a person not by some search engine. And to be honest, I need to rant and rave
about mortality and the human condition and all that crap that I learned in
Philosophy school. I need to channel
Nietzsche or Moses or some dead writer.
In the end after one thousand four hundred and sixty five words, I
realized that I am my father’s son. I
embrace it.
