A COVID History

I was confined at the COVID Fastlane section of the San Jose District Hospital (SJDH) when weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz got her medal for the country’s first-ever gold in the Olympics. I experienced difficulty in breathing with other severe symptoms of the disease.

They admitted me to the hospital on July 21, 2021, and for exactly one week, I was alone in that tomblike and white-painted square chamber. Either an oxygen mask or a nasal cannula is stuck in my nares to deliver supplemental oxygen and allows sufficient airflow to my lungs. I was in dire need of respiratory help. I have immediately undergone various tests and chest x-ray and other emergency procedures that I failed to ask the ill-equipped (compared to those in private hospitals in Manila) overworked, understaffed medical frontliners at SJDH.

I was lying helplessly in my hospital bed when hundreds of families have evacuated from four villages in three municipalities in Occidental Mindoro because of flooding caused by the effects of the southwest monsoon enhanced by Tropical Storm Fabian. I took a handful of different capsules and tablets until my breathing gradually becomes easy each day as the floods slowly subdued in the affected areas, and the evacuees came back to their dwelling places the next few days.

I also battled sleepless nights. It was Saturday morning, July 24, and while I was saying my morning prayer, a tremor followed. My fear doubled, for I am in a situation between the devil and deep blue sea: Earthquake and COVID. But as expected, the latter subsided, but it did not shake the COVID virus out of the breathing system of each Filipino in affected areas.

Global pandemics and disasters like earthquakes and floods or events like the Olympics, for that matter, are not only part of history. They are history themselves. We are victims of history, witnesses to history, and socialized by history and such reality made the human spirit always triumphant!

In my hospital bed, bored and isolated, I composed this short poem:

“You do not have regal bearing over my breathing,

Your crown has no dignity over me.

My breathing is a kingship where you are nothing but a slave

I am royal, no matter how I breathe.

As I inhale and exhale, my spirit behests my lungs and my mouth:

“Iustum inssufla.”

(Just breath.)”

The next day, a hospital apprentice appeared from my door in full PPE, pushing a wheelchair telling me that I will be moving to the recovery ward called “Italy.”

 “Ano naman ang pangalan nung room na inalisan ko?” I asked him while we are heading to the next building.

“Wuhan po.”

Me to self: “Not a bad name.”

(I later found out that the names were just coined by Dr. Anna Monica Bracamonte, the former hospital head, and my cousin Barbie, her nurse, during the height of the pandemic.)

*****

I am patient number 638 logged in San Jose, Occidental Mindoro. I was already on my second day in the recovery ward when Nesthy Petecio settled for a silver medal for the women’s featherweight boxing final bout. She lost to Japan’s Sena Irie. That was the same day when they took out the oxygen tube from my nostrils, as my oxygen level had already been stable for days. All in all, I consumed five tanks of medical oxygen.

My hospitalization, other than realizing the importance of friends, family, and relatives in supporting both in terms of financial, moral, and other material supports. That includes medical guidance from my cousins in the medical field, which made me do something I could not do for decades: cry. 

I cried once again for my wife, the love of my life, showed me how much she cares for me.

I will not mention the names of my friends and relatives here for they will not indeed like it. Perhaps, such love and kindness they have shown to me are part of why I cried.

I repeatedly played through my Vivo Camera and Music phone Willie Nelson’s rendition of Yesterday When I Was Young. It just popped from my cellphone’s screen on the third day of my confinement while I was browsing for a piece of country music that I love to listen to. I hadn’t heard the song since the Nora Aunor version was released when I was ten.

At 88, Willie Nelson is still alive, and part of the collaborated Asleep at the Wheel 50th-anniversary album, due this coming October 1 in the US. The song made me reminiscence on my childhood and practically the significant memories of my life with places and people that are both gone and still alive.

I am 59 now, and next year I will be considered a senior citizen. 

Well, thanks for the tears. Crying made me feel great.

Those tears have curative value to me.

****

I took five doses of remdesivir. While clinical trials suggest the drug is not very effective in treating COVID, recent studies have shown that it does block Coronavirus activity. Remdesivir is an experimental drug developed by biotech company Gilead Sciences in collaboration with the US Centers for Disease Control and Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

Maybe my system responded positively to the drug. That is why I defeated COVID in this bout.

Finally, on July 29, 2021, I was discharged from the hospital, and since then, I have subjected myself to further home quarantine. I have comorbidities, so I have to stay on the safest part of the road.

I was vaccinated with Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine on August 7 at the San Jose Public Health and Diagnostic Center.

It took 97 years for the Philippines to get its first gold in the Olympics. It took me 50 years or so to hear again the song Yesterday When I Was Young and I cannot remember when I last cried before this hospitalization and solitary confinement. One thing is sure. I will be a different man after this. I will cry a lot.

Remdesivir may have done its job well, but I am not counting out all your prayers and well-wishes, and my all-time favorite is the macaroni salad, which I devoured for the first time after many years.

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(Photo: Deccan Herald)