WordWell

I go to my gastro(-enterologist, someone assigned to check the status of my vital, digestive organs without ever opening me up) today. The clinic, on the fourth floor of Chong Hua Medical Arts, is one of the many antiseptic office-clinics lining along the narrow corridor. The building itself is nondescript, so not much to be expected of its inside as that of the outside. Instead of windows and soft curtains playing along the wind, air-condition units and their garish cases are arrayed floor upon floor, office to office, unabashedly in-your-face, on the face of the building. Like cold epitaphs only several meters higher. People streams to the building throughout the day solemn, all with a far-away look, but hopeful that this place might cast some bleak sliver of cure.

But in spite of that, there is unmistakable salvation of its architecture. There is cheerfulness in its parking lot that, though not sprawling, yawns generously. What makes it cheerful I don’t exactly know. Beside it stands a flagpole, whose length ends with a red flag flapping at the midday sun. I gasp to see it is the Chinese embassy. As imposing as the Asian economic behemoth that it represents, the embassy is alarmingly unassuming that I took it was a drugstore or the mess hall for weary patients. It would take several visits later to find that out it is not and would take a reading of Newsweek to know that this is how

China

does business: tightening grip of world cookie jar without anyone guarding or with everyone watching Super Bowl.

The gastro says that yes, I’m dying, and yes, contrary to my belief, not too soon. There would be a time for that but not the schedule I anointed. I make this one up, but this might as well be his words. Several weeks ago, he had me visit a laboratory who upon my payment of cold cash, extracted blood sample from my scrawny arm. It was starkly brownish, the blood I mean and not the arm. The result of the tests those blood samples, my pity goes out to all of my corpuscles who got inconvenienced to this process, undergone is what my gastro is piercingly looking at now.

You are sick, he says. Your body though is fighting. Some antibodies have become gungho, went berserk, took the matter menacingly, and initiated the warfare against this malady. Cheerful, I say to myself.

How have I contracted it, doc, I ask. From your mother. Or, nag-gerger na ka? (Have you got laid?), he says matter-of-factly. NO, I say. Really? He’s looking at me accusingly, as though he was startled to hear a vehemently vulgar lie. No, definitely, I’m sure of it. I really mean it.

            He whisks me up and leads me to an inner room, where he asks me to lie down on a raised bed. His fingers prance around on my abdomen, pressing, running them in some precise order, as though rummaging a buried scalpel on that part of my anatomy. Youtube told me it’s for sizing internal organs, whether they had bloated out of normal proportions. The manual check ends with him attempting to perform rumba with his fingers, and I almost pass out from the fatal tickle.

I get up and follow him going back to his table. He hands me the laboratory result. Stupidly I compose into an intelligent frown, and I attempt to figure anything out of what was written in there. Seconds later, and still stupid, I give up the pointless task. The next slip comes that contained two foreign drugs. The first one stops “their” multiplication. That would keep them at bay. The second one is vitamins. Two months, and then I will see you.

            Outside, I walk away from the building. Tonight will usher the Chinese year of the scampering rodent and as I trudge on

, I met two Chinese on the way. They are robust and sweating and heading in the opposite direction. I catch snippets of their conversation, but they might as well speak Oompa Lumpa’s.

I get to the drugstore fast and I get the prices of my medicine even faster. For two months, I need to ply my body with miraculous chemicals worth fourteen grand. I dash outside, and sidle into Mercury Drugstore fronting Osmeña rotunda. The price difference is slight, only by ten cents, but for many like me whose lives are on the threat of hunger and illness, cents and millions are alike.

Dashing back to the first store, I ordered enough for two days. Half a thousand has now been committed to their coffers.

Two hours past the appointed lunch break, I flush my first tablets with cold mineral water.

~ by emelito-torres on February 8, 2008.