Friday, May 09, 2008
Yap: Original ‘sigbin’
By Januar E. Yap
Meanwhile
SOME high level of acidity left me coming full circle in the emergency room where I spent the last days of my internship as a student nurse years ago. I was alone, kept the predicament to myself and walked into the room like, to use a line from the poem, “a big spender entering a bar.”
Swear to God, I announced to all the guardians in my head, it had nothing to do with the oblivious bingeing this time.
This was the same room, too, when at seven years old, a shard from a liquor bottle had slit a three-inch gape on my foot that ate up a haul of beach sand. I grew up exacting vengeance on that bottle, and left me for some blurry period as its serially inebriated casualty.
When the doctor asked what was wrong, cunning acid fizzled out with the pain. I had to fake a grimace to earn my E.R. table. They don’t call it beds, but tables. I was propped up into a stool by one of the nurses and I climbed unto the table.
“What’s wrong?” the doctor asked again.
I had my thumb pressed just a bit below my sternum. Can’t you see there’s ensuing coup down epigastric area, doc?
“Hyperacidity, I strongly suspect,” I said. He pressed my tummy and quickly released the push.
“Did that hurt?” he asked.
“Made no difference, doc, the pain’s constant,” I said.
“We have to make other tests to rule out possibilities,” he said. What sort of tests? For one, he said, a stool exam. Second, an enema.
Right that moment, it seemed, some ruthless skimboarder must’ve screeched against my intestinal wall. Enema, in case you don’t know, is when medical practice transmogrifies into plumbing works. Only that in lieu of the PVC pipe, a rubber tube is inserted into your bowels via your rectum to introduce liquids to dissolve whatever is stuck in there.
“I’ll think about it, doc,” I said. “Let me just lie here for a sec, and I’ll hit the road in no time.” Spic and span, I wanted to say, but some witch had fired up her cauldron inside. I had the ugliest grimace of all.
“Look, if we don’t do the tests, there’s no way we can diagnose you properly,” another doctor came up and said.
“I know what’s wrong, doc,” I said. “Too much acid.” Medicine, despite the human body’s idiosyncrasies, is an exact
science. The doctor closed the curtains and left nodding his head.
I theorized this was just accumulated flatulence. It was either social graces or political gas. The former defers an imperative venting and the latter beats the bloating powers of helium. Or, maybe it’s just undigested siopao.
Okay, okay, and hauling the courage of a hundred national heroes, I agreed to the test. They set me up sideways, and lowered the green drapes. Some fetishist sprites poked their noses, creating bulges on the curtains. Maximum exposure leaves one with the sick suspiciousness of an intense Mafioso.
Butt exposure can launch a thousand ships, or “hits,” by Net parlance. And yet, this was in the pre-Black Suede era, before the advent of medical practitioners with convoluted taste for black humor.
After the tests, I was wheeled into my room, which was on the fifth floor of another building. The human, through a mill of medical procedures officiated by anonymous masked men, is reduced to having the feeling of a lab rat. Nobody cares if you’re a CEO or an EIC, all rumps look the same. And all rumps, under the knife, is dignity under attack.
Halfway, some familiar face looks at you stuck on wheelchair and gives you that look as though it had found Budoy’s original sigbin. Good luck.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (May 9, 2008 issue)
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