Lean, mean fighting machine

June 2012 was the beginning of my last year in high school. I came home to an empty house and called out my usual “Ma, anong ulam?”

There was no answer.

Evening arrived soon enough, and with it came my father and some relatives from my mother’s side of the family: older cousins, uncles and aunts, even grandparents. At that point, I was already too anxious to resume watching sitcoms. I asked too many questions and was dismissively told by the adults that mom was in the ICU. Your mother is unstable, they said. And then they told my siblings and me to go to bed.

For three days, they refused to tell us anything else. We were children, and children couldn’t get involved in adult things. They had all sorts of excuses. You can’t visit mom, she’ll get stressed. You have school tomorrow. She’ll be home soon. When she’s no longer unstable. That word was used too many times — unstable — and I hated it.

If there was anyone who knew better than to ever describe my mother as unstable, it would be me. My mother was the very image of stability. She was everyone’s shoulder to lean on, from my baby sister to my brother, father, our extended families, her friends, and, of course, me.

She was a ball of energy who mall-hopped in the morning and attended a high school reunion at night. She could also make us mean birthday cakes, cookies, muffins, and creampuffs. She could cook some of the most delicious adobo recipes. On Sundays, she cleaned the house and then engaged in wild karaoke sessions. You name it, my mom could do it.

There was no stopping her.

Until that day when she finally came home from her stay in the hospital. She had lost a few pounds, and her cheeks were slightly hollowed. She couldn’t move around too much. Shopping dates and dinner dates with her friends were replaced by doctors’ appointments: for her heart, her lungs, her kidneys, and everything else in her body. Cooking and changing bedroom sheets were tasks given to the help, and baked goods, along with dairy, soft drinks, junk food, and just about anything a normal person could taste, were crossed off the list of things she could eat. The number of her prescriptions grew. There was also the draining requirement of having three dialysis sessions for her kidneys each week. It almost broke her.

The dialysis part of my mom’s life was probably the hardest despite other problems like money, or, well, the disease itself. She had to go down from three to only two sessions a week because it made her feel tired all the time, and she couldn’t take feeling sick week after week after week. Two thick needles pierced her skin every session and she breathed deeply through it each time, squeezing her eyes closed from the pain and gripping my hand so hard my fingers would momentarily turn purple.

The most painful thing to witness in it all was the fear in her eyes — some of the patients with whom she shared the shift no longer arrived for their turn. Her knowing that one day she would be one of them haunted her, and she didn’t have to tell me. What she would do was say she was slowly becoming ugly, her once luminous skin darkening and drying up from the constant filtering of her blood — my mother, the person who had always told me that it didn’t matter if you looked beautiful to other people so long as you looked beautiful to yourself. When she watched television at night, she would ask me to massage her stiff hands and quietly murmur about how she was no longer a proper mother.

She had a heart attack during a cab ride that Monday. There was no pain, she recounted. “I just blacked out.”

The attack prompted a forthcoming illness: chronic kidney disease, and doctors explained that her high blood pressure had been one of the symptoms. It was an incurable disease that gradually rendered kidneys useless, and by that time, only 10 percent of one of my mom’s kidneys was working correctly.

There was no stopping the damage unless she got a kidney transplant, and even then there was no guarantee her body would accept it.

Despite everything, I knew my mom was in there somewhere. Her fight came through her stubbornness as she grew stronger after months, and eventually years, of sessions. She’d wink at me just as she was about to bite into, say, hash browns from McDonald’s or a peach mango pie from Jollibee, and tell me jokingly: “Anak, mamamatay na rin lang ako, lulubusin ko na! Mamamatay akong masaya!” Morbid, but it let us know she could do this.

My mom was as sassy as ever. We were still working on finding a donor for her, and she had more complications such as osteophytes in her feet and a blocked vein near her heart. But my mom being my mom, she was able to pen in dinner dates with her friends again, accompany my brother to the movies, make me my 20th birthday cake, refer to my girlfriend as her aliping saguiguilid, play Candy Crush Saga on her phone, get bored of Candy Crush Saga, and, finally, move on to Candy Crush Soda.

I had a feeling she’d also go for Pokemon Go, and if that made her happy, who were we to stop her?

My amazing mother, Mymy, passed away just as the world stopped in March of 2020. Mom would have been 50 this year, and her life continues through her children’s stories about her.

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Nicole, 25, is a writer and self-taught illustrator whose works focus on women empowerment, body positivity, and mental health awareness.