Making our days

Lately I’ve been losing track of my mother’s hospital confinements—when, where, for what—because they happen so often.

This latest admission—“confinement” sounds like incarceration—came right in the middle of UP Diliman’s Arts Month, with events scheduled nearly every day and requests for me to deliver opening remarks and inspirational messages. There were times when I wanted to beg off and say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel very inspirational today.”

But more times than not, I knew that attending the events is important because I end up drawing strength, and inspiration, from the students. For example, one night there was student group Tugma and its Spring Fest 2015. The students performed on Chinese, Korean and Japanese musical instruments one after another, ending with Mindanao’s kulintang. At one point, a male kulintang player just had to pull out his cell phone and do a selfie… without losing a beat.

“Make my day,” I marveled, feeling the day’s tensions fading.

People factor

It’s not easy every time a text or a call comes from the hospital, and making a visit early in the morning or late at night. Yet it’s during the most adverse of circumstances that we have to learn to shrug away, even smile at, the vexations. More importantly, we need to learn to pause and appreciate the many moments that do bring joy, and strength.

One morning I had to rush to the hospital because I was needed to sign a consent form for my mother’s CT scan. I was feeling somewhat anxious at the prospects of the scan. My mother, like many other people, does not like the procedure. It’s not painful, but there’s a sense of dread as you move from the hospital room to the CT scan room, and then go through the “tunnel.”

But this time I was told that a portable scan would be done in the hospital room. I imagined something like a small scanner/printer but no, it looked like they’d dismantled and sent down the huge machine.

It did make a difference that the scan could be done in the room. We tend to think of hospital machines as cold, impersonal, even intimidating, but there have been so many innovations that succeed in bringing a human element into hospital technology. One simple example: Think of how patients are now transported on hospital beds that literally glide through corridors, rather than the old rickety gurneys or wheeled stretchers.

All said, though, these technologies and medical advances still need the people factor—not just biomedical skills, but the ability to connect, to empathize, with patients.

In my classes with health professionals, I remind them that curing—administering the medicines, checking the charts and tests—is the easy part. Schools train health professionals for this curing, and constantly remind students to be objective, to detach themselves from patients, as they go about their duties.

But more than curing, health professionals need to learn to heal, which is a long-term process and which involves patients, family members and friends sharing in the ordeal of illness. That’s where the empathy is so vital.

I know St. Luke’s Medical Center inside and out but a few nights ago when I was on my way to my mother’s room, I actually got lost. The long corridor suddenly looked ominous. I thought of stories in rural areas of people suddenly disoriented during travel, sometimes, as stories go, even straying into the world of the supernatural. There was a moment of panic and then a passing hospital staff member asked where I was headed. She didn’t have to, but taking that initiative can mean so much, can make someone’s day.

Another time in my mother’s room, I was beginning to feel terribly sad watching TV footage of evacuees in Mindanao, especially children and the elderly. I was thankful that my mother can no longer follow what’s on TV. Then in came a nurse, apologizing that his marker pen had run out of ink so he couldn’t write his name on the white board on the wall.

“I’m Gino,” he said, adding that we should call him any time we needed anything.

Whenever Gino checked my mother, he’d engage in light banter while going about the assigned task. He’d leave, quietly, after the work was done, but he also seemed to know when to stay on, when a consultant would visit, for example, and help would be needed.

The people factor involves timing, anticipating needs. My mother’s caregivers, Rose and Frans, have made that people factor almost an art, and I often find that ability diminishing in hospitals, given the heavy patient load.

I admit that I worry when male nurses are assigned to my mother because generally, they don’t relate as well to patients as female nurses do. That’s stereotyping, of course, and I know there are more Ginos out there, and not just among nurses.

Which takes me to another make-my-day account about men who care. The other day I went to a chapel for a wake, to comfort Ache Florendo, a director of one of UP’s offices, who had just lost her husband. It happened suddenly—a stroke, a few days in the hospital, and he was gone.

A Mass was ongoing when I got to the wake, and so I stayed at the back, watching Ache, and initially worrying. I had talked to her on the phone and knew how distraught she was. But within a few minutes at the Mass I knew she would be all right, given the way her sons were comforting her.

Ache had raised her sons well, to become men who are not afraid to comfort other people with the simplest of acts, like putting their arms around her, hands gently patting her on the back. That last part is almost instinctive; when you carry children you almost automatically do that to calm them down. Many times, they reciprocate—pat, pat, pat—as though to say, “You need some comforting, too.”

Back to Ache’s sons. I could see they had learned as well that it was all right to cry with her, even as they held her. Men sometimes feel obliged to be “strong” by keeping a distance and trying to console people by saying, “I know how you feel.” Psychologists actually advise against that because no one really knows how someone else feels. When you hold or hug someone, laughing or crying with them, you’re saying: “I’m with you. I’m here for you.” No words are needed.

‘Pagpag’

When we were leaving the chapel the driver asked me if we should do a “pagpag,” a practice where, after going to a wake or attending a burial, you take a roundabout route before returning home. “Pagpag” literally means to dust off, and in this case it means throwing bad spirits off the track.

I almost said no, but reminded myself that the driver would probably feel better if we did. Then, too, I remembered that I still had to go to the hospital to see my mother, so I said, Sure, why not. Almost embarrassed with myself, I rationalized that the “pagpag” isn’t so much to disorient malevolent spirits as to have more time for reflection.

I’ve written in the past about taking the stairs, or parking further away, when you’re in a hospital. That’s somewhat like “pagpag,” when you think about it, with fringe benefits like exercise, of coming closer to taking the suggested healthy 10,000 steps a day. More importantly, a longer walk desensitizes you to the dreary aspects of hospital and illness, allowing you to take stock of what’s been happening.

We tend to exclaim, “Make my day!”—asking people to make the day good for us. But in the end, it is the way we look at the world, at people around us, that’s more crucial. Amid war and disease and suffering, we should appreciate and bask in the goodness and kindness around us.

We make our days.

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E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph