Déjà vu

A “life and death situation” was how Occidental Mindoro Rep. Ma. Amelita Villarosa, a political ally and close friend of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, characterized the current medical condition of the former president and Pampanga representative. Arroyo is said to be suffering from choking episodes caused by a titanium implant—placed in her body in 2011 during surgery for a cervical spine ailment—protruding into her esophagus.

She is in “deep pain,” said Villarosa. “She needs medical treatment. She cannot eat because there is metal blocking her food. She can speak but with great difficulty.” Echoing the lawmaker, a person close to the Arroyo family but who asked not to be named told this paper that Arroyo had “a life-threatening condition.”

How is the public to react to this latest twist in Arroyo’s unending medical saga? With a sense of déjà vu, perhaps—it having heard the same note of urgency and dark foreboding in November 2011, when Arroyo and her husband tried to leave the country on the strength of a temporary restraining order issued by the Supreme Court on travel restrictions set by the Department of Justice on the couple. The Arroyo camp’s main argument was that the former president was so sick that no doctor in the country was good enough to treat her reported bone disorder. “Life-threatening” was also a phrase liberally bandied about by her allies to press the government to allow her to seek medical treatment abroad.

But Arroyo’s doctors then, including her chief physician, were more sanguine in their pronouncements. When asked if Arroyo’s condition was indeed life-threatening, Juliet Gopez-Cervantes said: “As a doctor, when you say matter of life or death, there is multiorgan involvement, there is deterioration of the vital signs. That’s an urgent thing that is a matter of life and death. Probably, objectively speaking, if we are talking about that, she is not in that condition as of now.”

Similarly, for all of the dire prognostications aired by Villarosa et al. on Arroyo’s present condition, her medical bulletin does not seem to indicate anything extremely urgent. A quantum electrochemistry examination at Makati Medical Center reportedly confirmed the titanium protrusion, but Dr. Nona Legaspi, her government doctor and jail custodian, said: “I can confirm a positive yield during the examination based on the report of our medical team who observed the procedure, but it was a wet reading, we are still waiting for the official written medical report…”

So, no official confirmation yet, and, as Legaspi added, despite the new development, no added medication has been administered to Arroyo. “But she was advised to wear always the neck brace, especially in uncontrolled areas.”

In other words, Arroyo may indeed be sick with a new complication, but she is not that sick. And the renewed calls for her to be allowed to leave the country for treatment overseas, coupled with the overdramatic scenarios being peddled by her allies, serve only to arouse suspicion that this may yet be another ploy by her camp to spirit her out of the country and thereby spring her from the nonbailable charges for which she is under hospital arrest.

As this paper pointed out in an editorial last year, “Arroyo and her camp must forgive the public’s cynicism in this matter. The former president has not exactly been a model of candor and sincerity in her 10-year tenure in Malacañang, and even beyond, when she has used her still-considerable political clout and material influence to dismiss, diminish, stall and frustrate questions and investigations into her scandal-plagued administration.”

A transparent and judicious way to resolve this matter is to let an independent specialist, or a team of them, evaluate Arroyo’s condition. They can then recommend the appropriate step for the government, and the courts handling her cases, to take.

At this point, coincidence or not, the timing of the latest push for Arroyo’s leaving raises red flags, coming as it does just as her ally, Chief Justice Renato Corona, is coming under considerable adverse scrutiny at his impeachment trial, especially with the perceived game-changing testimony of Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales. Now that the end game for Corona seems near, seeing his patron developing another “life-threatening” condition and clamoring to fly out of the country smacks of bad optics, at the very least. Again, Arroyo has only herself to blame if the public still ain’t buying it.