The Mommy Homilies

(I wrote the following article for Code Red Magazine a looooong time ago…)

All through the first eighteen years of my life, I’d lived as if I was immortal. And why not? My maternal grandmother lived for one hundred years, six months and six days before she felt it was getting pretty lonely here while all her friends are partying in the high heavens. If she wasn’t a smoker when she was alive, only God knows up to what age she could have reached.

That time, I thought God’s plans for me involved an action-packed, high voltage livewire career and lifestyle. I did well in school. I was very active in sports and other extra-curricular activities. My social life was doing great. I even managed to get myself into the country’s premier state university in Diliman. I knew myself. I knew what I wanted. I was highly competitive, extremely focused and bent on pursuing success and all its perks. Back then, Nike’s slogan fit me to a T – IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING. (Adidas daw pala ito. Hindi Nike. Sabi ni Ninoy!)

Little did I know that defeat doesn’t always come like one big blow from a fellow fighter. Defeat came to me like a thief creeping in the night…no bells, no sirens, no alarms. What’s worse, there’s no “other competitor” involved in this fight. It was just me and my body.

I was rushing up the stairs of the AS Building when I first felt it. I was feeling very exhausted (too much cramming, I thought.). My feet felt very heavy and I was half dragging my left foot up the stairs (too much malling, perhaps?). By the time I reached the second floor, I was way too tired to make it to class so I decided to rest in our tambayan (okay, friends, let’s bond!!!). An hour of rest did me good, save for the fact that I couldn’t stop my eyelids from drooping and my tongue seemed to be getting in the way of my talking (too much telebabad till the wee hours of the morning, I suppose?).

A few weeks after, not much had changed. In fact, it was slowly getting worse. I was falling all over the place for no reason. I couldn’t ride the IKOT jeep without help going up and down. I was losing weight at an alarming rate (which I thought was more good than bad). What prompted me to see the doctor was when my hands decided that they don’t want to hold my toothbrush for me anymore.

My first visit to the doctor yielded a prescription for multivitamins (I wasn’t getting the RDA from my junk food diet), calcium tablets (to help my tired bones during my trips to the mall), and a brand-new boyfriend (having a two-timing boyfriend is bad for your health!). I took the vitamins religiously and went in search for Mr. Faithful but still my body continued launching an all-out strike on me.

After almost a year of visiting doctors, faith healers, and quacks, a neurologist confirmed the diagnosis. I had Myasthenia Gravis (MG), a neuromuscular disorder that has no known cause and no known cure. It doesn’t usually strike young people but it did strike me! The very rich and famous Aristotle Onassis had it but I couldn’t go around with my MG like a status symbol. My lifeline is one tiny orange tablet called Mestinon that I should take three times a day for the rest of my la vida loca. It won’t cure me but it will help ease the discomforts of my MG. I was also advised to have an operation done to remove my thymus glands in the “hopes” (and I stress the word “hopes” because it is quite an “experimental” solution) that it would slow down, if not stop, the progression of my MG.

My mind was caught in a hurricane. The words depressed, shocked and dumbfounded couldn’t even measure up to what I felt when I heard the news. To be more specific, I felt like I was trying to cross the Sucat Interchange after the truck ban has been lifted with all those big container vans out to run me over. I asked the proverbial questions : What about my plans and my dreams?! What about my life?! And of course the very famous of all questions…God, why me?

Another eighteen years have passed since that day and I am still alive. Still with MG but still ALIVE. Looking back, I know I’ve got a lot of blessings to be thankful for. I couldn’t have survived the ride through all these if not for my family and friends, of course, who have stayed strong for me.

God also blessed me with a very good neurologist who gave me not only prescriptions for my medication but also the one good solid advice that I continue to cling onto to this very day. You see, after breaking the news that I had MG, my neuro gave me just a little over five minutes to absorb everything and to ask my three proverbial questions before telling me : Look, you may have a very limiting disease. You may not be able to drive a car or to move around as much as you used to and as much as you’d like to. But hey, we are still not sure of what you can and cannot do because we don’t know what your limits are till you try to do all the things that you want to do to the best that you can. Live your life normally as if you don’t have it. Never let it pull you down or much more, to control you. If the warning bells start ringing, take a breather, take your Mestinon and try again…

Defeat may have come creeping in the night and stole away some of my physical strength. But, then again, maybe God has plans for me other than living an action-packed, high voltage life. I don’t know. All I know is I have to fight back, move on, be the best that I can be and, of course, take my Mestinon…