EVERYONE must have felt it, the sense of foreboding that one day Cebu would have its first victim. It just did, yesterday to be exact, and it punched me to the gut. Death becomes real when it comes closer to home.
Compared to other specialties, pathology has only a few practitioners in the country. In Cebu, they are a very small community, tight as a family.
Helen Tudtud was still Helen Evangelista when I first met her, a colleague of my wife in the old Southern Islands Hospital. It was easy to like her. Apart from the fact that I knew two of her sisters who were lawyers, Helen was so amiable you’d sometimes wonder if the word was coined to describe her.
She and Dra. Malilong worked together for nearly 40 years and retired in the same year. In between, she got married to Dennis Tudtud, an oncologist. They had two children, Dennis Thomas and Debbie.
Throughout these years, Helen remained close to the family. When my father died, she came to comfort us. When my son, then only five, woke up one morning writhing in pain, I rushed him to the SIH (now the VSMMC) and entrusted him to the care of Helen and Minda Bueno, another close family friend and pathologist, because I had no one else to turn to since my wife was on a fellowship in Japan.
It pains us to learn that Helen has passed and Dennis is waging the biggest battle of his life in the hospital. It pains us even more that we could not visit her when she was ill and could not even attend her wake because there is going to be no wake. So I am writing this tribute instead.
But our pain is nothing compared to that of her children and here I quote this plaintive note from her son on Facebook: “All I know is that MY HEART IS BREAKING and I can’t hug my sweet and loving MOMMY HELEN anymore.”
Wait, there is something else that DJ wrote which I must share because it shows the dark side of humanity that we must all strive to erase:
“But even before my mom passed away, rumors were already circulating that my mom has died as early as March 18!! Some heartless people even posted it all over social media. My mother was still fighting to stay alive but people were already killing her!
“Do you know how painful it is to have parents admitted and both in serious and guarded condition and yet you hear news saying that your mother has already died, when she is still holding on and fighting to stay alive. We understand the fear. We understand the panic but do these heartless people understand how much more fear and panic that we are in? Then came the police cordoning our entire compound. What for? We never breached the quarantine protocol!
“We did not choose the virus. We do not even know where Mommy and Daddy caught it. My parents NEVER left the country since this year. We are not the virus and yet people are treating us like we are. We do not know why this happened to us.
“We may never know why.”
Let’s remove the police cordon, please?