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Sunday, January 05, 2003
Obenieta: Vignettes of big trouble
By Myke U. Obenieta
Sun.star essay
Some lives, no matter how short or small, are no square pegs in the roundness of tall tales. Consider these:
How a boy came down a mountain and returned a hill And so his mother remembers: If there was anything he loved to do, it was gardening.
Never mind if he were unschooled and never got the chance to read about all things small and wonderful.” As it were, his family’s little patch of farm in upland Sudlon Dos was the entire world to him. Small wonder if he were acquainted only with anthills, or if he looked at everything from a worm’s eye view. Never mind if his way of looking did not frame the larger issues that often make the world ever smaller: Wars on the verge of breaking even before the smoke of previous battles had settled, politics making a playground out of the graveyard of promises, and the whole nine yards of human affairs gone awry in the wake of official conduct steeped in the tragicomic.
In the end, it was the left eye of this shy 16-year-old farmers’ son that made him larger than his brief, almost uneventful existence. Not only did Joel Alcontin’s photo got blown up on the front page, in what seemed like a homage to the riveting image of the Virgin Mary’s apparition, his eye dripping with blood after splinters of a whistle bomb hit his eye at the height of the New Year’s Day revelry. His plight also shoved an institution—the Cebu City Medical Center—into the proverbial eye of the storm as insinuations of hospital incompetence again reared its horn.
When his parents brought him down to the city hospital’s bed, little did they know that he’d end up in a grave no bigger than a molehill.
Unexpected, too, how a wee bit of a whistle bomb gets into a boy’s eye and explodes in the face of an institution.
It’s not right that because we live in the mountains, so his mother waxes indignant, we will not be given attention. In a small voice, a mother’s lamentation could easily be shrugged off as no more substantial than a wisp of smoke. Or, the haze of a tall tale.
Then again, those who can appreciate an iceberg can swear: the invisible could spell big trouble.
How a mosquito’s bite could devour an entire hospital
At seven, Cristian Barrosa can never be trusted in chewing the cud of Chaos Theory: a mere flutter of a butterfly’s wing could stir and unleash a storm in another part of the world.
Just as incomprehensible is how the ripple of rage from Barrosa’s parents who lived in a seaside town in Liloan could crash like a tidal wave upon the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC). It’s a mystery, too, how Barrosa’s doctor can whip out a diagnosis that could hold a candle to Chaos Theory: to see only the poor child’s swollen tonsil and be blind at how his frail body flared out with dengue fever.
For this doctor who could not see how a small part represents the whole, synecdoche alliterates well with sick joke, indeed.
The impossible can happen, surely, in a strange time when kids can be cloned while a child like Barrosa can breathe their last because his doctor was allegedly asleep in her quarter where no mosquito would buzz intimations of doom and disrupt her dream.
If it were not for inefficiency and grave disregard of the safety of their patients of the medical staff of the VSMMC, our beloved child would still be alive today,” Barrosa’s parents stressed in their affidavit.
Such cry may sound pesky like a bloodsucker’s drone, and hospital authorities may shush it away or shut it off as yet another tall tale.
But if a butterfly’s wing can whip out a whirlwind somewhere else, why can’t a mosquito squashed between two palms in one fell swoop of its thunderclap?
(January 5, 2003 issue)
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