Personal health scares

Losing friends to health issues is always very painful. Tragically in the last year, we have lost a hefty handful of unforgettable names in Philippine sports. From tennis official Ajay Pathak to veteran sportscaster Butch Maniego and other known figures in sports, the losses were all health-related. The latest unexpected passing was that of former national basketball coach Dong Vergeire, which was even more startling for me since he was actually younger than I am. That struck home.

From 2002 to 2008, this writer independently produced “The Basketball Show”, the first magazine program encompassing the entire range of leagues and personalities in the Philippines. In the five years since, three members of my lean production staff have passed away, one by drowning in the capsizing of a Batangas ferry. The other two were taken by illness, one a promising, incredibly talented producer much younger than myself. Those are hard to get over.

The human body is actually designed to live well over 100 years, yet more and more we find ourselves sighing about people who died “too young”. What has been happening to this generation?

First of all, we gradually diminish the capacity of our engine, the heart. In school, we have access to indoor gyms, weights, instructors, multi-sport facilities, track ovals, open fields, perhaps even a swimming pool. In the first two years at university we are required at least once a week to run, play basketball, badminton, soccer or volleyball, and get some guidance on staying healthy. We seem to recover from injury or illness rapidly, almost as if shrugging off the rain.

When we graduate, we are disconnected from all of that, and find ourselves far more sedentary at work. Whether it be driving or commuting to work to being in an office, we’re sitting down. We have less physical activity and more exposure to filtered airconditioning. It’s simply more inconvenient, and requires some cost. So now, we have to pump our hearts up with coffee or soft drinks, and only end up walking or running to and from our transportation. Little by little, the lack of activity eats away at the heart’s capacity to pump. It starts taking more effort to deliver oxygen-rich blood all over the body.

In addition, we tend to eat whatever is convenient, which usually means fastfood. You could easily put on a few pounds in no time at all, which makes you even more lethargic, and snowballs the problems. Statistically, for every few pounds of fat one gains, the heart needs to pump the blood a few extra miles longer to get to the vital organs and extremities. And as you get older, it gets harder not just to lose the weight, but to want to do it in the first place. Your vascular system also starts to suffer. Over the long-term, this could lead to heart problems, or even trigger rare conditions. My mother Lirio succumbed to a rare condition called ameloid angiopathy, which meant the blood vessels surrounding her brain started erupting. She was never athletic or even that physically active, but was otherwise healthy. What did her in was personal stress, almost four decades of it.

The most obvious change when you hit your forties usually manifests on your eyesight. The eyes change shape and refract the light differently, causing our distance viewing and ability to reconcile images to change. I used to joke that I’d call up mobile phone service providers, because their phones started moving farther away from my eyes while I was using them. Of course, this all started happening when I turned 40, so maybe cell phones have an age bias on them.

Stress is primarily an emotional reaction to a situation, usually meaning not getting what we want or being fearful of how a certain situation will turn out. Our fight or flight mechanism causes the body to secrete substances that sometimes do it harm. In some cases, blood is even drawn away from the limbs and concentrated in the torso, protecting the most critical organs in an act of self-preservation. Being high-strung affects breathing, digestion and sleep, diminishing their restorative powers. These in turn are life-shortening. Health guru Deepak Chopra has said that the human body is capable of healing itself of any known disease, but only if we give it a fighting chance.

If you don’t believe that stress has any outward effects, a new branch of science can prove it. Anthropometric history, which is less than three decades old, claims that the high fate of urbanization in many industrialized nations causes people living there to become shorter. As populations become more and more densely concentrated in certain areas, it’s as if people’s bodies voluntarily shrink to fit in less space.

It is partly this confinement that has spawned campaigns against stressful work life. A former marketing executive named Marianne Cantwell has even written a book entitled “Be a Free-Range Human”, wherein she teaches those fed up with being employees how to work wherever they want, whenever they want. Through online courses and videos she films wherever she happens to be, Cantwell says everyone can follow their own schedule by finding their market and doing what they want while earning the money they dream of. The book was released internationally last June.

Because all of our health issues usually develop over a long period of time, we don’t notice them, or avoid thinking about them. That is, until we are chillingly reminded by the death of someone in our demographic group. It really doesn’t take much – at least 20 minutes of activity that gets you sweating and breathing a little hard three times a week – to stave off the onset of lifelong diseases. I once lost 45 pounds without exercise largely by cutting back on the liquid part of my diet. 

Those around us who have sadly passed away are still doing us one last service. They are reminding us to take the first steps to ensure that we do not become memories sooner than we have to.