My sister was blind for seven years. She had a freak high blood pressure stroke that cut her optic nerve.
Tess died early. The first message from the afterlife that I intuited from her was cute and naughty: “Now I can see you but you can’t see me!”
She must have been watching me make a tough decision on an eye operation. I was so scared I clung to my cataracts as if they were jewels. But finally I could hardly read or write anymore. Tears rolled down my cheek from the effort of trying to avoid a blind spot, and keeping a bright light focused on the page.
Vision is the capital in my profession. So I finally decided to have the procedure done after I learned that the global success average of cataract operations is 95 percent. I forced it into the mantra I liked to live by. It is never too late for anything. It is always the right time and always a better time for having waited. (Sus, Mariel said, wrong application!)
Of course, just to be 195 percent sure I wanted it done by an expert—the best in the line, and that was, said Mariel (again!), Dr. Manuel B. Agulto. I had also heard about him from a friend whose husband had waited in line for a consultation for days (or maybe years). He finally gave up, and I presume the old guy died with his cataracts on.
But Mariel reminded me that Arline, Dr. Agulto’s pretty wife, had been with us in several of our meditation sessions. She was his office manager. So I found a connection and got a quick appointment.
Deathly scared
I remember trying to have a cataract operation with some other doctor 10 years ago. But a few days before the surgery, the doctor noticed that I was deathly scared. He said it wasn’t a good frame of mind to take to an operating table and told me to come back when I was ready. I never did (not to him, anyway).
This time it helped a lot that Dr. Ramon Pesigan, the anesthesiologist, spent some time calming me down while deftly inserting an IV needle into my vein. I liked him because he allowed me to keep my dentures on during the operation. Because, I said, looking like a creature from the Black Lagoon would make me feel so depressed. Mr. Pinpin, the patient next to me, who was handsome, with apple cheeks, didn’t ask, and he looked cavernous without his dentures.
The procedure was at Manila Doctors Hospital on UN Avenue. The last time I had been there was when my youngest son (now 54) was born. The reigning obstetrician then was José Villanueva, and he made such a beautiful stitching of my caesarian I wondered if he got experience mending his own socks. He was so used to delivering boys from me that, when Wendy came along, he brightly asked the next day, Ano, tutuliin na ba natin? Memories!
Today, Dr. Manuel Agulto was the hero, and all heroes make you feel that you are cradled in God’s hands. I felt secure. He did such a good job that the moment I looked into a mirror, horrors, I could see clearly all the lines around my mouth and the crows’ feet at the corners of my eyes. But I could read without glasses, which I hadn’t been able to do since I was 16!
The cataract operation on my left eye took no more than 20 minutes including the implantation of the new lens. It was completely painless. It was completely successful. I was given a list of painkillers, just in case, but I never needed any.
But an operation is an operation, whether it’s a hospital or a war operation, and therefore stressful, before and after, because of everything you have to do. Whether you are having a hysterectomy, a kidney transplant or a lobotomy, you have to get clearance from practically every doctor you ever consulted in your life—heart, diabetes, lungs (I never had a lung problem but I had to have X-rays of those, too). That meant visiting several hospitals.
At least, the Agulto clinic missed asking about my fourth vertebrae disalignment which had given me a sciatica pain on my left leg, thank heavens. They even missed the insomnia doctor I had a whole course with and the psychiatrist who said I wasn’t insane.
So I hate it when friends say, “You had a cataract operation? Wala lang yan!” I want to say I went through a miracle and I am healed! I went through hell and I am still not out of it. There’s still all those drops I have to drop—different drops in one eye or in both eyes four times a day. And I have to wear these unglamorous protective glasses that bare my eyes which have no glamour, no eye shadow, no eyeliner.
I have to sleep with this cumbersome plastic eye cover taped on my nose and eyebrows, and sleep on the side that I can’t fall asleep on. For about a month, “because the wounds are inside and therefore invisible but it doesn’t mean they can’t be infected.”
But there will soon be a turning of the tide. None of my grandchildren want to be writers or stage producers or musicians. Rafa Fernando wants to be a doctor and goes around with medical students who say “clavicle” for collar bone and refer to an order of chicken breast as pectorales major and their abs in the gym as rectus abdominus.
The other grandson doctor-wannabe, Carlo Regalado, says he overheard a wise tip from some intern, who said, You get a reputation for being a good doctor if you are pinipilahan— have a queue of patients outside your clinic. But even if you are a beginning practitioner, you can orchestrate such by scheduling your (few) patients on the same day and the same hour. Voila—pila!
I hope all their dreams come true. Even if I’m not around to see the pila outside their doors, I can always look down and say, “I can see you, but you can’t see me!”
Bragging rights
It’s graduation time that allows lolas bragging rights.
Miguel D. Fernando, my youngest grandson, graduated high school from Community of Learners with an Award for Academic Excellence, and also an Achievement Award in Music.
Miguel studied in Feny de los Angeles-Bautista’s COLF because as a child, he was diagnosed as dyslexic. He soon got over that. Miguel’s valedictory speech (which of course he read to his lola) was impressive considering that his mother, an excellent dentist, didn’t pay much attention to her grammar, and his executive father, a great raconteur, writes in a convoluted manner that never gets to the point.
Grandsons Carlo Regalado (Wendy’s) and Rafael “Rafa” V. Fernando (Arcus’), who want to be doctors, were inducted into the Phi Kappa Phi International Honors Society. (Carlo’s older brother Franco was also inducted in the same society.) Rafa was additionally inducted into the Phi Sigma Biological Sciences International Honor Society for science majors.
Rafa was magna cum laude for a while in one of the most exclusive courses at UP Diliman, Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. He will graduate cum laude. Rafa is councilor of the University Student Council and founding member of the Molecular Bio Band. The Molecular Biology and Biotechnology group to which Rafa belongs bested 100 other groups’ papers from the university when they crossed over into Marketing and won the AdCore Teenspeak finals. Marami pa, but my editor bids me STOP.