mga leksyon sa pagitan ng buhay & kamatayan (lessons learned between life & death)

SO MANY LESSONS, many of them simple, a few of them commonsense, some of them complicated, that I learned from my brush with eternity last month. What started out as a odd sound in our heart turned out to be an issue that threatened to affect our existence.

If it wasn’t for the insistence on checking and double-checking why things weren’t working out the way they did, the vigilance of a doctor, and finally sticking to our gut feeling, I’m not sure I would be here talking to you kabayan.

To summarize. I needed urgent surgery to repair a valve in my heart, but it wasn’t so obvious until the problem almost became life threatening. Because of the following things I did, the problem was identified and helped doctors help me survive:

Know your medical history. From around five years ago, my heart started producing a funny extra sound called a heart murmur, which is not that unusual but could be a sign of something going on with your heart. It’s not enough to cause immediate alarm, but something the doctor asked me to monitor. Because of that advice, when a problem finally happened, I was no longer surprised and was able to deal with it.

One of my children has a heart murmur, nothing to worry about in their youth, but just the same something to watch over just in case something happens. Wala namang mawawala.

stay fit. Di naman kailangang magazine superfit and body beautiful tayo, but it helps your general health if you stay within the window of healthy weight and exercise regularly. Not just that, it helps you fight the trauma of illness and surgery and helps you recover faster from the challenge of so many meds to take and the stress of staying in the hospital, which are all essential if you want to conquer serious illness.

And about my personal experience with surgery and meds. A lot of the trauma and stress linked with surgery is co-existing with the pain inconvenience and recovery of surgery, which when you think about it involves invading your body, opening it up and either repairing or replacing a diseased organ. That’s a big deal for anybody.

listen to your body. I was sick enough that the doctor was recommending that I be scheduled for surgery, but not sick enough that i was booked for urgent surgery, meaning I had to be literally short of breath and so weak that doctors had to operate. Best case scenario, the in the public health system, was two month from now. Tough luck, the doc says, but the subtext was obvious: beggars can’t be choosers.

Meantime, I had the nagging feeling I had to tell the cardiologist I had experienced chills and low-grade fever twice in the last week, nothing serious but enough to tell him. He told me initially that it probably had nothing to do with my heart, but before I left his office he changed his mind and ordered a blood culture test. It shortly revealed that, aggravating the situation, the part of my heart that needed surgery had been infected, and I moved up the queue, from two months, to one week from diagnosis. All because I couldn’t ignore fever and chills. I’m no medical psychic, and the doc needed a battery of tests to confirm my gut feeling, but out of everyone in this world, you are the best judge of what’s happening in your body. If there’s something that’s bothering you about your body, don’t ignore it.

Time is very important. I didn’t realize it, but by the time I was ready for surgery, I was very ill. Doctors are usually up front and direct about your chances and the situation before you, and in my case I was told that the infection had reached my heart. I wasn’t told of what would happen if I didn’t have the surgery as soon as possible. but consider: I was transferred from my small-town hospital to a major hospital 24 hours from the time a decision was made to do so, and from there, I was scheduled for the surgery within 72 hours. Just to make it more interesting, a labor strike also on schedule, and there was a chance my surgery was gonna be postponed. No way, the lead surgeon said, are you kidding me? That’s when I realized how close I was to joining Dad, who just left us two-plus years ago.

So in my case, each day delayed was a day that further jeopardized my health. but it could’ve been worse. For some patients, hours were precious. And further complicating some cases were the fact that if your cases weren’t urgent, you had to join a long queue. Understanding the time element in health is important.

So, these are my lessons learned during my almost-instant surgery. I’m none the worse for wear kabayan, but it could’ve been a different story. Learn from my experience, without paying tuition fees!

Mabuhay, thanks for reading!