'Now is the time...'

A few weeks ago, my son caught dengue and had to be confined in a hospital. What was most excruciating was that no medicine could make it go away, the way an antibiotic could vanquish a bacterial infection, the way an armed soldier could shoot down the enemy in Kabul. I also knew the mosquito-borne disease could be fatal.

All that the doctors and nurses could do was rehydrate the patient and monitor his vital signs — if he was bleeding, if his blood pressure plummeted, if he had fever.

And as parents, all we could do was wait and see and pray.

Mankind has sent the man to the moon and invented the Internet, SMS messaging and Instagram. It has even invented a pill that melts away your fat. But it still has to find a pill that will annihilate the dengue virus.

So when someone you love has dengue, all you can do is you eat, pray and hope to live another day. I realized that despite the power of knowledge and the many parachutes God has given to bail us out of a bad situation or illness, there are times and instances when we are utterly dependent on His grace and mercy. That we can seize control of our lives to a certain extent, but that the future, really, belongs to God.

“Now it’s just a waiting game,” one of the nurses told us as she reported the decrease in my son’s platelet count, referring to the long excruciating hours one must spend making sense of lab reports and waiting for the next one. In my son’s case, they drew blood from him every 12 hours, so the wait was pretty long and testing. My husband and I monitored the numbers like they were the scores of an Ateneo-La Salle championship game. Every single-digit drop was frightful, every double digit drop was, to us, an emergency.

We were told by his doctors during his second day in the hospital to already look for blood donors. Perhaps it was just a matter of procedure, but the instruction conjured frightful scenarios in my mind.

Sometimes I think crises like this are like Post-Its that God gives to remind us of the presence of true friends in our midst. When I sent a text message to very few friends about my son’s blood type, a classmate from high school immediately replied that her husband is of the same blood type and was on call. A friend immediately reserved the platelet concentrate from his hospital’s blood bank. So did my friend from the Red Cross. To all of you who responded, your names are written in neon colors in Post-Its on my heart.

My son’s doctor was insistent on a walking donor of the same blood type. So my son’s good friend motored all the way to Alabang and donated blood, the first time in his life that he ever did so. The friend’s girlfriend also volunteered to do the same, only she wasn’t sure of her blood type.

Thankfully, my son never needed a transfusion. Instead, I was the one who got a transfusion — of a renewed belief in the generosity and selflessness of friends. So when I’m disappointed in people, when I feel that life is full of jerks, I think of the people who responded to my text message, one of them saying that if worse came to worst, “I will bleed for you...” — and I know for sure that life is full of good people.

After my son was discharged from the hospital, my husband and I were renewed by a massive transfusion — of blood type H. As in Happiness. As in Hope.

Sometimes we need to get bitten by the D (as in Disappointment) virus, so that we may get a transfusion of that which restores our appreciation for those we may have taken for granted.

***

My friend Red Cross governor Carissa Coscolluela (who reserved blood for my son in the Red Cross bank just in case) gifted me a few months back with the book: Now Is the Time: 170 ways to seize the moment by Patrick Lindsay.

It isn’t a newfound realization — that we have to live the moment, give up regrets about the past and quit worrying about the future.

My son’s hospitalization was one big Post-It for me, a reminder that each day must be savored by living each moment. “Now” is a better word than “today.” Because “now” is all we surely have. The next moment is a blessing, and the next, and the next, as we hope and pray for the gift of time.

It’s the control freak that lurks in each of us that makes us want to be in charge of our tomorrow, and to an extent, that is admirable. A person with direction gets to his destination. But when worry, family squabbles, office politics, intrigues and disappointments preoccupy us to the point that we fail to enjoy our journey to our goals, here is a timely reminder from the book, one of 170 “Post-Its.”

Now is the time to…

Enjoy the day. “Make the most of each day. Use up the hours like a child. There are no guarantees how many we get. Older people will tell you they rarely regret the things they did, only the things they didn’t do. Don’t spend your life intending to do something. Start now!

I am no life coach, but here are two Post-Its from me. Now is the time to:

1. Try boredom — Oh, the bliss of boredom. Because of the rat race and the competitive environment we live in, we pack our days with useful activities, things that will take us forward, things that will help us pole-vault to the top of the heap — till, like an engine, we overheat. So, once in awhile, allow yourself the bliss of being bored. Of sitting in your chair competing only with your daydreams. Boredom, as long as it isn’t a habitual state, can recharge you.

2. Feel the gentle stream from a warm shower slide down your back. It’s luxuriating. A man who found himself paralyzed from neck down after a freak accident was once asked what he missed most about his “past.” He didn’t say driving, running or even having sex. He said it was the feel of a warm shower on his back.

So, from now on, enjoy every luxuriating trickle down your back — or your heart.

(You may email me at [email protected])