Year 2008

The Departure (fiction)





It is another dreary morning for me, my life is devoid of excitement for years now. I wake up and proceed to work and between yawns and dragging of my feet, I dutifully fulfill what my work demands of me. I take care of Rehab patients in a Trauma setting. By now I am used to this, and I have probably mentioned this in my stories over and over again:I work too much. It just goes to show I have no life except this work, I have no place to go to except my home and this hospital. I am no longer embarrassed to tell you my OFW stories, yeah this is no different from the stories told so many times by different Filipinos living in different places around the world. We have no other tales except what we do and know in our limited experiences and environment. It would be exciting if my work were that of a journalist - everyday I would probably come up with a feature about a new person, a new place, a new event, a new condition. I'd probably be a travel journalist if given a choice. I'd love to be in the academics as well, reading and teaching and when vacation time comes, I'd settle in a quiet place somewhere and write my master pieces. A homeless bum as my life won't be bad as well. No worries about anything, I will hide in one corner of a public library and write history the way my hungry gut and ecstatic brain sees it.

That won't be the case today. I enter Francisco's room and he is beaming and smiling. He says, "Chino, my friend, this is the big day. I will be flying back home to my country. " The thought of him leaving excites me too, but for a different reason. I am tired of Francisco. Looking at him, his native American features remind me of the people I left back home. Francisco surely looks like Filipino were it not for his Latino origins. I've worked with him for months now with no progress at all. Everything is routine with him. I lift his quadriplegic body out of the bed to the wheelchair. Then I lift him from his wheelchair to the edge of the mat in the gym. We work on rolling, sitting up, trunk control - the whole PT nine yards.

Since weeks ago, I have already known there was no way to progress beyond what we are able to do now. The tasks we have on our hands are purely monotonous and mechanical. Francisco senses that too. There is no way of hiding it. Despite the hard work we've been doing, his big muscular legs are getting atrophied and bony. His whole body loses its volume. He is being transformed from naive, pleasant young man to a whining hard to please asshole. Worse, because he is an immigrant worker without legal papers and insurance, no facility and nobody wants him.

Lately, his skill in provoking anger is just impeccable. He will ask me to position him on the bed this way... no, that way....oh turn me on this side...turn me the other way...I need my water... turn on the TV... find the Spanish channel for me...turn the volume up...turn the volume down... turn the TV this way...no, that way.... call my Nurse... I need my pain pill.

Francisico stop this, I want to yell but I hold myself back. There are minor things you can at least try to do by yourself instead of acting like everyone is here to serve you. He says, No I can't. Look I am paralyzed. I can't move anything.

But you can, I say, you can at least try. After having spent a lot of time doing these little things for you -- try to be grateful at least. Look, if every time I pass by your door or wave at you, it doesn't mean I am waiting for your order.

I stare at him with pity sometimes but there are times I just want to see him rot in his evil laziness. He takes away the precious times I need for my other patients. He is just so needy.

Francisco, you are not my only patient here you know.

He sulks. He says, I will not be treated like this in Mexico. In Mexico, my brothers and sisters and cousins and my neighbors will be nice and will help me in everything. He turns his head away from me.

But you are not in Mexico, I tell him. You are alone in this country just like me.

I take a deep breath. I stare away from his bed where his emaciated body is lying. I look out the window and watch the thick foliage of a wide-trunk tree standing at the lawn of the hospital. I am feeling suffocated, imprisoned in this room where everything is unclear and unpredictable. I don't feel like a Clinician here, when I am with Fancisco, I feel like a slave to give comfort and entertainment.

I read everything I could about his condition. I was hoping that his body would achieve some form of plasticity, a new paradigm in spinal cord injuries that suggest some components of the body can compensate for what had been broken or injured in other parts. I read books that told me a patient with incomplete spinal cord injury at cervical level six would eventually regain independence at least in bed mobility and transfers from bed to wheelchair. Yet it has been two months since I started working with him and we are stuck on sliding board transfers and long sitting on the bed, and for every little gain we accomplish, there usually are set backs that follow: a bladder infection, a skin breakdown, a significant loss of weight, and his frequent requests for pain medications. Recently he was baker-acted for his verbal threats which at one point were directed at all the black Nurses. Despite his ethnic background, he felt white. And then, he threatened the Doctor that he'd send somebody to the hospital to shoot him. The Doctor immediately baker-acted him. Which was negated by the Director of Mental Health (How can you baker act a twenty year old kid who lost all his functions after being shot? Of course he is angry and would threaten everybody!) and the two butted heads. Seeing all the troubles he created, I began hating him.

And then, I need to deal with his denials -- he'd ask me everyday when he could walk again. After I explained to him a million times that an injury of his, with the kind of magnitude it has, is sadly, difficult to upgrade to walking. I have to show him illustrations of the spine, how the spinal cord works, how an injury like his affects all his movements. And he'd still smile at me, in a 'you don't know shit kind of way' When will I walk again? he'd insist. He can be very difficult at times. I say, You can't even roll on the bed or sit upright on the edge of the bed and you are asking me about walking? He watches me sweat and moan in picking him up from the bed. He plays numb and dead and watches me with satisfaction through my hard routine of getting him out of the bed, to his wheelchair, to the mat where, I alone, it seems, laboriously go through the session. I am the Therapist, he plays like a piece of log.

Francisco, try to maintain sitting. He says, I can't. Francisco, try to push you hands on the mat. He says, I can't. Everything I ask him to do he says he can't. And after our one hour session he asks me, "When will I walk again?"

I bite my tongue. He lashes at me, at the Doctors, at the Nurses, saying, All of you know nothing. In Mexico, a Doctor would have put me on the operating table and fixed me by now. I swear Chino, after I have my operation back home, I will come back here walking so you can see how stupid you all are!

I refrain from responding. I keep my head down as I go through the routine. What can you say to an angry immigrant? He came to the US to work in farms and labor pools without papers and then one day he was shot in the neck rendering him quadriplegic. I will be angry too. The Neurosurgeon states the bullet is imbedded right close to the brainstem it would be risky to touch it. Nobody would like to touch it.

I know there is more to 'just being shot in the neck' in his case. He says somebody approached him for money and when he could not produce it shot him in the middle of the day. I try very hard to believe him but there is always suspicions at the back of my head. There is more to the story than he wants me to believe, I know. But I refuse to be nosey, it is not my business to investigate these suspicious gun shot wounds. There are so many gun shot wounds in my hospital that I simply take what is being told to me and allow the police to investigate the 'real score' behind them. Usually they are drug related.

I usually end up being the punching bag in here. I am the one working with the victim daily, listening to his anger, fear, anxiety, regrets, longing. We laugh at times, get friendly with each other occasionally, but most days I have to be the receiving end of his litany. I know it's never directed at me, many times Francisco apologized for his meanness claiming he is just angry at the world and God. Still, I don't think I came to work in America to be the punching bag. But then, in my line of work, whether in my native land or this adopted land, I will still be a punching bag.

And today is his last day here.

"What time is your flight Francisco?" I ask him as I open his closet to pull out his clothes and fold them to his bag. These are not really his clothes. He was rushed here in the hospital with nothing. He has no home. I had to bring some of my old clothes for him to wear. He can not be naked in the gym where I bring him to work-out. I put his shoes on which, again, have been donated by co-workers and his wheelchair donated by a Catholic Charity.

"I will be leaving this afternoon, Chino" he beams as he seeks my eyes. It's been months since we started working together and we've always been glaring at each others - me always asking him to do yet another set of exercises while he moans telling me to stop, or feigning anger he says, "Are you serious?" or "Don't you know how hard it is to do what you want me to do?" I have always been persistent with him. In his situation, how can he survive the world without helping himself? I don't think I will be there with him when he is discharged.

There is something peculiar in this moment as I stuff his clothes to bags, as I teach his friend about managing the wheelchair, or helping him in and out of bed. I may not like him but I feel sad seeing him go. In him, I saw myself. He is very excited as he had never been on a plane before. He came to the US through the back door and now, upon request of his own family to their embassy (it turned out he was not from Mexico after all) and after his friends had collected sufficient amount to pay for his fare back to his country, the hospital had allowed him to go. The airline company had discounted his fare for humanitarian reasons. And I personally agreed for him to get back to his own family because that's what I would like to do too were I victimized the way he was. When the Sheriff's office visited him to investigate and inquire about the accident, he refused to give information. He was just bent to go home no matter what.

I wheeled him outside of the hospital and together with his friends we lifted him to a rented van.

The day before his departure, I talked to my co-workers that although we were not allowed to give any gift to a patient, just this once, would they contribute a few dollars for someone who comes home with nothing at all? Some bemoaned the fact he was very mean and cruel, they had nothing to do with him. Some, and they were only a few, in fact there were only two of us, gave him something like forty bucks. "To buy gifts for the parents."

He said he would proceed to the hospital after his arrival in his country and a Doctor will operate on him and he will walk again.To the very end, Francisco held on to his belief that he will become normal again and will come back to us to show us. That all we have done for him was useless.

A Catholic Charity had given him a Bible and I placed the forty bucks inside it with no note, no message, nothing.