Sunday, December 14, 2008

How I spent my near-Christmas vacation

It was a cruel joke; Baz Luhrmann’s kind, the kind that blindsides on an idle Tuesday. I was locked, loaded and ready for that three-week vacation that was sedating my mind like an opium-induced dream and spicing up my pathetic moss-watching existence when it hit. I suddenly felt bloated and heavy, like a balloon that’s about to burst. The pain was searing, and it was creeping all over my abdomen like a pissed-off python.

The joke was, it struck just hours before my flight from Singapore to Manila. Just moments before, my head was swimming in a nice haze that pretty much involved a white, tropical beach in Batangas, a full-body massage at The Spa, and “nature-tripping” around Makati and Timog avenues with some dirty old friends from college. It was my sweet escape from the sweatshop, my chance to refurbish that bubbewrap of self-esteem my toxic boss had methodically stripped away.

That dream went “poof!” when my insides went “pop!”. Instead of a hammock on a beach in Batangas, I wound up on a bed in some second-class hospital in Paranaque.

I was hoping the resident at the emergency room would rule my condition as a simple case of abdominal pain, give me some over-the-counter prescriptions and proclaim me fit and healthy for days and nights and weeks of debauchery and decadence.

After pushing and poking my stomach and listening to it with a stethoscope, however, he referred me to an attending who, after pushing and poking my stomach and listening to it with a stethoscope, told me she needed to run a few more tests. My intestines weren’t moving, she told me, and they were “distended”. That meant one more day at the hospital for more tests.

Right there and then, I wished I had Google at my fingertips. Distended? Intestines not moving? What the hell was she saying? Just make me fart, bitch, I wanted to tell the good doctor.

***

It was a mistake, I thought, when I declared – with the zeal and gusto of an evangelical trying to get his flock to fork out tidy sums from their pockets onto his spiritual kitty – that I had medical coverage. That was like hanging around my neck a huge, neon-painted invitation for the hospital’s color-coded minions to hold me hostage. Which they did.

The nurses quickly ran an IV tube through my wrist, took some blood, urine and stool samples, and then rolled me through radiology for my X-ray; I even had an ultrasound and CT scan. They then rushed me off to a room that would become my prison for the next two weeks.

Fully tethered and without the plethora of questionable-but-still-plausible knowledge Google and Wikipedia brought, I was at their mercy, and I swore I could hear the hospital’s cash registers ringing with every minuscule drop coming out of my glucose drip. Drip. Ka-shing. Drip. Ka-shing. Drip. Ka-shing.

Mid-way through my hospital stay, I did bother to check my bills, and I found out that it cost me 1,600 pesos (about S$60) every time they stuck a needle into my vein to get some blood, and they did it countless of times, mostly at night like thieves in a hurry to steal a family heirloom, for God knows why. (I had thought once that maybe they were doing it just for kicks or to check if my blood was actually red.)

***

The thing with shacking up in a hospital is that the bad news you get is directly proportional to the money you’ll be spending and inversely proportional to how good you will feel inside. Simply put: the more you stay in a hospital, the more you have to spend, but the less you’ll feel better.

In my case, it quickly got worse when three doctors showed up at my room in quick succession the day after my tests.

First was the attending who got me confined. She waltzed in, asked me how I was and then told me another doctor would be coming in a while. That was the gastroenterologist, a man with a booming voice who made a huge effort to compensate for his miniature frame – he was barely five feet – with his oversized confidence and ego, who basically told me my large intestines were really fucked up and that I would need surgery. Those visits, alone cost me about 10,000 pesos already. Ka-shing.

Then, minutes later, the surgeon – a portly, middle-aged man who talked like a wily real estate agent – showed up and told me he’d have to run some surgical instruments through my abdomen, and that I would have to spend at least one more week at the hospital, three weeks in recovery, two months before I’d feel normal, two years before I’d feel the same again... Well, he basically told me: Say goodbye to your vacation and your fucking life, asshole! Oh, and while we’re at it, let me pick your pocket.

The hospital could let me go, he said, but he could not guarantee that the next time I’d feast on my favorite inihaw na bangus and pork liempo my intestines would not rapture and I’d die a very painful, humiliating death.

The really bad thing was, the surgeon said, that I wouldn’t get coverage if ever I’d be lucky enough to reach a hospital because I would have then already checked out for the same illness. Insurance companies cover only one illness each year, he explained; they wouldn’t pay up if you, for instance, suffer a stroke within 12 months from your last one.

The choice was pretty obvious.

***

The surgery took eight hours. It was supposed to take just three hours but then, despite all the tests they made me go through, they failed to see how fucked up my large intestines really were – a three-inch section was already “decaying”, they told me later; they even showed me that piece, a blackened strip of flesh – and that doing pin surgery wouldn’t be enough; they had to to cut a 12-inch hole into my abdomen to get into my intestines.

When I woke up from my anesthesia-induced stupor, there was a hose running through my nose, a catheter running through my dick and another hose drilled into my left torso. The first words I could think of were: Oh fuck. I got fucked.

I wanted to go back to sleep and not wake up for three years.