| written June 23, 2008 |
I woke up to the sound of crying.
The watch said it was three in the morning.
With one foot still halfway through the door where one reluctantly leaves the unbearable reality of dreams, I figured there was a patient at the ER howling in pain and the nurses have yet to inform me of this consult. So, out of learned response, like Pavlov’s salivating dog (because , really, that’s what internship is), I grabbed my white coat and stethoscope and rushed out of the Call-Room, only to be greeted by a dimmed and empty emergency room.
There was no suffering patient.
The howling I heard was the wind.
And the angry tears I saw came from the sky.
I looked to the glass doors. It was now barred with some iron tool to keep it from being violently flung open and it was like I was staring into an alternate world.
You know that old horror flick, “The Army of Darkness”? The one where this obnoxious guy gets sucked into a different time? The one with so many alternate endings?…It was like that. Like I was looking at a portal of whirlwinds and flying chainsaws and am about to have the greatest scare of my life.
But let’s not get carried away with my imagination.
It was just a storm.
Signal number 3.
Frank, they called it.
Frank must be gay, because that storm had a woman’s temper. The unforgiving kind.
I thought I actually saw the wind.
Was it possible to see the wind?
Wet and angry, as though it was suddenly and unwillingly wrenched away from the other side of the world to this place where it shouldn’t be. You know, like it should have been quenching the thirst of malnourished children in Africa, or watering the rare blossoming of one of those incomparably beautiful but short-lived collections of flowers in the middle of the Sahara desert. How would you feel if you were suddenly denied such a remarkable destiny? You’d be angry too, I’m sure. Unjustly misplaced. Raging for vengeance. Sending No-Parking signs skidding across the street. Chopping up rooftops and dropping them on top of other houses, like bottle caps placed on the wrong bottles.
When I saw giant century-old trees uprooted from their massive grip of the earth, I knew I wouldn’t be going home for a while.
I remembered my dad was in Iloilo and said he would be driving home in the morning. My first instinct was to call him. “Stay put, dad”, I wanted to say. Don’t drive home. The radio said River Passi was overflowing.
Overflowing?
When trucks needed cleaning, they drove them down from the main road to the brook they called River Passi and they get baths like the cows and carabaos. That river was like a baby footprint inside a daddy footprint. A brook in a river’s bed. And Frank filled it to the brim.
Overflowing.
But of course, I broke my phone last week and dad was taking it to Iloilo to be fixed. So I called home instead. I told them to call the landline in Iloilo and tell dad to stay put. The first time I called, Nanay Ka, our cook, answered and sleepily said she would make the call. The second time I called home, just to check if dad agreed to stay put (he’s very stubborn, you see), our phone line had been cut.
River Passi overflowing.
Though it was an hour and a half away, River Passi overflowing means we are having one of the worst storms since Bagyo Undang, where there were so many deaths. I could barely remember it. I was probably busy listening to my eldest brother’s horror stories under the blanket to realize other people were losing their homes and their families.
But I’ve grown. My world has broadened from the corners of our blanket to horizons I have yet to reach. And with my dad in Iloilo and my mom on vacation in the states, I realized I was responsible for everyone in our house. I didn’t have Allan’s stories to transform my fear into excitement anymore. I felt like the River Passi must have felt.
Overflowing.
With fear.
And uncertainty.
It was like Father Sky suddenly decided he wanted rivers everywhere, so he sent the rain. A male rain with a woman’s temper.
The hospital was flooded from the top floor. There were small rivulets running from all the balconies following lines to the doors and draining to all the corridors.
Imagine the building suddenly coming alive and the corridors are its veins and arteries, and the rainwater, its blood, circulating by the law gravity…
And it was breathing…
Deep, powerful diaphragmatic breaths, as though awakened in an ungodly hour from the legendary slumber of rocks…
Inhale…
And the cafeteria door was snatched up from its hinges and thrown into the hallway.
Exhale…
And the ripening Santol fruit were pulled from the tree and juggled round and round across the rooftops and then dropped back to the ground.
Inhale….
And the nuns’ garden got tossed into a salad of greens and browns, spiced up with helpless cats trapped in the tree branches.
Exhale….
And one could almost imagine a giant, magnificent creature yawning half-awake and stretching its arms, oblivious to the destruction it has caused.
…
I thought of all this while briskly walking to room 219 so I could borrow a fellow intern’s phone.
Like I said, my imagination is a form of defense. It transforms my fear into a different kind of stimulant. It effectively distracts me from thinking too much of the negative things that could possibly happen, you know. Like our rooftop suddenly deciding to go on a trip to the clouds, or our trusty Jeep suddenly exploding to the sky like fireworks…
Christopher was snoring. He had a river in his room and a blinking light bulb, but he was apparently oblivious to those as much as he was to the storm raging outside his balcony. I texted dad and then home. But nobody answered.
By the time the sun was up, I was out of imaginings. The hospital was no longer a magnificent mythical creature. It was simply a flooded building with faulty drainage.
No phone.
No electricity.
And though I lived only a ten-minute walk away, there was no safe way home.
I was definitely running out of imaginings.
I was trying to reach home through Christopher’s phone again when two grandmothers walked into the ER drenched like hatchlings. One of them was carrying the smallest infant I have ever seen. He was white and pink all over. But he was unnaturally small, as though the thunder and the storm woke him up way too early and he hadn’t realized it wasn’t his time to come out yet.
Thirty-four weeks gestational age by last menstrual period.
Small for gestational age.
Mother gave birth in a well-family midwifery clinic despite being a high risk pregnancy.
Oxygen saturation: 74%
A barely audible heartbeat.
An hour into the world.
Very fragile.
Undersized.
Nameless.
And perfectly beautiful.
They intubated him after a while. His oxygen saturation just wouldn’t go up. If he could speak, he probably would have told us: “I’m so sorry, I just don’t have enough surfactant for your oxygen.”
And he was probably thinking to himself, “I’m in a box helmet designed to keep my air. I’m surrounded by fussing strange beings with masks and rubber tubes coming out of their ears. And I could barely breathe. I might as well be in the Moon for all the difference it would make.”
He was born to be an angel, they said when he breathed his last.
He probably thought, “What a wet world Earth is! And so noisy! I might as well go back to the heavenly courts where everything is serene and warm and bright…”
Then Tatay Junior, our driver, arrived at the ER doorway wearing a haven’t-been-used-in-a-very-long-time blue raincoat, riding the trusty motorcycle with an umbrella and an explanation that our Mahogany tree has fallen and took the phone line and cable with it. Then Dad’s text message arrived, telling me he did, in fact, decide to stay put and wait out the storm.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I hadn’t even realized I was holding my breath. This was, in fairness, the longest 24-hour duty I’ve ever had.
Before leaving for that treacherous motorcycle ride home, I looked back at the baby under the oxygen hood with a tube probed into his lungs and imagined his mother crying the tears of heaven, meekly laying them down on her palms like all her suffering were unworthy tribute for the safe journey of her son, who should at least be dying in her arms but is instead in a glass box in a faraway place and a thunderstorm between them.
Lost too soon.
Like a star.
Marking the fulfillment of a dream.
You wait so long for it to fall and when it comes, it lives for but a blink of an eyelash.
And Frank’s tears became a little calmer.
Its breath gradually became more tranquil.
And its heartbeat slowed down to a rhythm that made everyone just a little bit more hopeful that tomorrow, the sun will come.
It was as though the storm was gently and humbly realizing that there was someone, a mother, somewhere, with an insurmountably more compelling reason to weep.
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