Good morning. I will bring my wife Yeyette to the hospital later during the day. Early tomorrow morning, the surgery to remove cancerous material from her right breast will commence. I do not know what will happen afterwards. I’ve been lying in bed most of the time, feeling very feeble, as if I’m the one who’s sick. I even contracted cough and headache for a couple of days but dextromethorphan did them in (lucky me, it wasn’t COVID-19). Stress must have probably taken a toll on me. To be honest, I feel more timorous about the incoming hospital bills rather than the medical procedure itself since we’ve been receiving reassurance left and right that stage 2 breast cancer is highly treatable. But still, a surgery’s a surgery. And cancer is cancer. Like what I said, I do not know what will happen afterwards. Strangely enough, I don’t feel like crying. Besides, I’m not the type who would weep in front of my wife and kids when the going gets tougher than Sarah Gerónimo’s mother. I’d rather do it someplace else. In the midst of all this emotional uproar within me, I couldn’t stop clowning around the idea that my wife was stricken with one of the world’s most dreaded diseases that not even in our wildest fears would paralyze us one day. And so the list of cancer jokes in my tired head has piled up — I’ve been singing that popular chorus of The Corrs’ “Breathless” by turning it to “Breastless” just to annoy my wife; I keep on saying to her that while my zodiac sign is Cancer, it was her who got it. I thought of looking up for a photo of English rock band The Cure to create a meme: “My wife’s got cancer, but I don’t have The Cure.” Indeed, both her ailment and the incoming monster bills are teaming up to create a perfect bulldozer to flatten my brain. So really, the only thing I could count on right now is to heed a friend‘s advice to just “surrender everything to God”. Also, I still need to count on everybody’s prayers… and financial aid. 😖 Using social media to ask for monetary aid truly disgusts me. It feels like licking the floors for spilled milk just for me to survive. But I had to do the shameful because I have no other choice. That shameful act of mine is for my wife’s sake. She is my five children’s beacon of hope, not despicable me who is a highly succesful negative thinker. So as the world panics because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, in this dark little room I try hard to surrender to God what needs to be surrendered.
EL FILIPINISMO 