‘Hospiphobia’ should be in the dictionary

IF I WERE to coin a word, I would coin “hospiphobia” to define fear of hospitalization. The sick go to the hospital to recover from a disease, only to come out “sicker” in the pocket.

One night last week, I felt unusually weak and nervous. I took a pill but it failed to lower my blood pressure which had shot up beyond 150/100. So I had myself driven to the nearest hospital.

Better to get in and out of the hospital alive, I thought, than to sleep at home eternally.

After what seemed like an hour of “interview” by a resident physician while waiting for a vacant private room, I made it to one, downed three kinds of unidentified tablets and got tethered to a bag of dextrose. I prayed for fast healing so I could sit up in the morning, type on my laptop and beat the deadline for my next day’s column.

It did not turn out that way the morning after. I texted a message to the editor, begging him to assign someone else to occupy my space for two days.

My third day saw me undergoing a cardiac scan known as “two-dimension echo” but I was well enough to be discharged. The remaining condition was that I pay my bill. I did.

The hospital is one place I would not like to return to. I had been there many times and found it inhospitable, always draining the money that had taken me months to earn.

I have turned 69 or one year short of 70, which is the average lifespan of Filipinos. I often ask myself, “Where have all the good years gone?” It seemed only yesterday when I was a young one, working for a successful career in journalism.

I console myself with the determination to stay alive in accordance with King David’s view that men who stay alive after age 70 enjoy “bonus” years: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10).

A journalist has a “till death do us part” covenant with his profession. Journalism is a lifetime career. After 49 years of writing for a living, why should I give up? It’s possible to enjoy old age in the company of young folks. But I have to stay healthy.

The vitamin ad “Bawal magkasakit” strikes at the core of the bitter reality that the average senior citizen dies poor in our country, partly because of expensive medicines and hospitalization. My late parents, both educators, had exhausted their retirement money while confined in several hospitals.

If I were working in the United States where my nurse son works, I would not worry. The government would foot medical and hospital bills.

On second thought, I am luckier than my classmates who have gone ahead to Kingdom Come.

I often check my memory by recalling the names of my classroom teachers. I always succeed in naming all my teachers in the elementary grades but not all in high school and college. I wonder whether early memories die last.

I remember my late great grandfather Catalino. I was a preschool kid in the 1950s when he took me to the grave of his wife Felipa. That done, he said, “Better to have lived and died than not to have lived at all.”

That turned out to be a healthy motivation to live pa more. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)

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