I am delicate like plastic
Last week, I was at the hospital. I had a terrible case of hypocalcemia, which I had suspected (totally incorrectly) to have been some fancy shit like Münchausen syndrome, which explains why it took me three days to get help. But before all that, I was shitting liquid.
Wait, backtrack. Here’s how it happened, in a convenient, chronological narrative we all love.
I was having diarrhea during Manny Pacquiao’s bout. I ignored it, because ignoring it was easy: there was Manny beating the crap out of the Golden Boy, and although having liquid shit squirting out of your anus might be fun (especially if it’s really colorful), it couldn’t possibly compete with the “Dream Match.”
By evening, when I finally took notice, it was semi-too-late. I was too dehydrated; I had lost too much of the electrolytes that count. I couldn’t even flip the finger, or poke my dog’s butt with a long stick so he’d get annoyed and run after me.
Funny thing is, I actually held out for two more days, trying to use my old Jedi mind tricks to will myself to be well. Those two days were a half-conscious bout with oral rehydration, intermittent fever, and screaming matches with a ghost who looked like one of my long-dead childhood enemies and that called himself “Your Personal Motherfucker.” By the second day, I was half-dead: no amount of Gatorade or soft, boiled food would pass through my digestive system. So I continued losing water and energy. On the third day, I was a zombie at the emergency room telling the doctor there’s a bunch of little ninjas in my stomach who kung-fu whatever I eat back up my mouth. “So you vomit everything you eat?” doctor says. “No,” I say, “there are little ninjas…”
Doctor does her examining thing, makes me lie on the table, feels my abdomen, and declares I’m not as fucked as I think I was.
Doctor: Oh, you just have hypocalcemia.
Me: Is that like when Ripley had this alien inside her and eventually it broke out of her chest, screaming like a nasty baby alien?
Doctor: Uhh, no, actually, you’ve just lost lots of electrolytes. Your stomach muscles have stopped moving.
Me: [looks at the ceiling, imagines stomach muscles actually stopping with a steam engine hiss].
Doctor: We’ll have to stick needles in you and hook you up with an IV. And drugs. You’ll be fine.
[A nurse preps the needle, which looks absurdly large for my vein].
Me: [stares hard at ceiling, thinking happy thoughts]
And like magic, in just a few minutes, I was well. Just like that. All I needed was intravenous hardcore rehydration. Damn, I should have one of those at home.
I have to tell you this was the first time in years I had ever been to a hospital, with me as the patient. I was so bored I had to ask my sister to bring me some books to read and a notebook I can scribble stuff on. She brought Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield and Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers On A Train. I told her “Charles” and “Dickens” are both slang for penis, like “Woody Johnson” or “Rod Cockburn,” and I wonder if Charles Dickens had been the butt of schoolyard jokes just because of that.
I had to bring the IV bag, with it attached to my left arm, with me to the restroom. I didn’t allow anyone to assist me. I discovered when you lower the IV bag enough, gravity immediately makes my blood drip back into the IV line, instead of the other way around. This fascinated me. I showed it to my sister.
Roch: What’s that?
Me: That’s my blood, dripping into the line. Look, I lower this bag, my blood begins flowing out. I hold this high, like this, the blood retreats. Cool!
Roch: Eww!
Two friends, Tito and Marilyn, came by in the evening. I told them I was totally fine, that visiting me at the hospital makes me feel a little mushy, as if I were an old man. Tito was hilarious: he was wearing that formal barong office get-up that the hospital people probably thought he was a funeral parlor rep visiting to negotiate with me about the “best funeral package.” It cracked me up. Jokes were exchanged. Good post-liquid-shit-slash-hypocalcemia jokes.
Back at home, my two dogs hysterically greeted me with their dog version of “Welcome back, asshole!” As if I had been gone for a very long time. I missed a lot of things. I celebrated it by playing, in full almost-inhuman blast, Alpinestars’ “Burning up” over and over and over and over… Then I poked my dog’s butt with a long stick and ran like hell.
Uncategorized | Comment (0)And in the afterhours, you’ll see, I love you, almost madly
Two years ago, a female friend told me about another female friend who was so infatuated with some guy that she actually stalked him. She would shadow him, hide in the bushes, jump into a taxi when he drives away. She was totally crazy about him that all the shit she did deserved at least one Judd Apatow movie. The funny thing is that that female friend isn’t your typical crazy — she taught English in some prestigious school, well-educated, not totally a loser. But she was doing this, and I thought, what the outrageous fuck was that?
Sufficiently “inspired,” I went home and spent the night pacing about my room, looking up at the ceiling, scratching my butt on occasion, and whispering to myself, “Jesus fucking christ there’s a story here, there’s a story here…” At some point, I actually sat down and began writing. I wrote a story about a stalker, but I told it in the first person, made the main character a man so I can relate, and increased his general aura of loserness and desperation. And hey, I also made him a “struggling writer” so I can put things in his mouth I’d usually say (I guess I’m not the only person guilty of that).
The result is the story “Blind Spot.” I showed it to friends, and the various reactions can be summed up as one-liners: “too sappy,” “characters’ names are corny,” “where are the gratuituous sex scenes?”, “no gun duel?”, “OMFG, I hate Beck,” “I like it, reminds me of my crush!”
Between “too sappy” and “Oh my God, I like it!” I decided to give it a shot. I emailed it to the Philippines Free Press.
However, I received no response from the editor, so after a while, I forgot about it. Around that time I started Skirmisher and worked on a long story that I had hoped would develop fully into a little novel. I never finished that “little novel” but I received news that made me not depressed over that failure: it was from the Free Press editor, saying that “Blind Spot” won and was getting Second Prize at the magazine’s century-old Philippines Free Press Literary Awards, which I learned is second only to the Palanca in terms of prestige and badassness or something like that.
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