Minding Mayo

By Al S. Mendoza

HAVE Y0U heard of the Kawasaki Disease?

I bet you 19 of the first 20 readers of this piece haven’t.

No, the disease is not caused by the Kawasaki motorcycle.  Nor is the first victim of the disease surnamed Kawasaki.

Dr. Tomisaku Kawasaki from Japan discovered the disease in the 60’s and for which the cause of the illness, which begins with high fever for at least 5 days, remains unknown to this day.

Kawasaki Disease is a children’s illness that, if untreated immediately, might cause a heart attack or aneurysm.  It is also known as the Kawasaki Syndrome or mucocutaneous lymph node syndrome, which can damage coronary arteries or the heart muscle itself.

 About 80 percent of those reported afflicted with the disease are under age 5 and are mostly Asians.

Children over age 8 are rarely affected.  It is this fact that broke my heart the past week.

I was in Palawan starting last Monday (May 22) for work mixed with pleasure when my grandson, Mayo, was diagnosed to have gotten the Kawasaki Disease.

Mayo, as you know, isn’t 8 anymore, having turned 9 on May 2.

On Monday night, Mayo was taken to the hospital for high fever.

Immediately, Prof. Sol Juvida, my best friend     and  my  partner  forever, and I dropped everything in Puerto Prinsesa – crocodile farm and all – and boarded the next available flight to Manila last Wednesday, May 24 (we couldn’t get a booking on May 23).

From the Centennial Airport in Pasay, we motored straight to Makati Medical Center.  There, we found Mayo asleep like a baby, his eyes sunken, his mouth agape.

When he awoke, there was not a twinkle in his usually happy eyes, not a smile in his usually gleeful lips.

He didn’t extend his hand for our palms and next kiss the back of our hands – a practice he’d been doing the last 7-1/2 years or so.

He looked helpless “as a kitten up a tree,” weak and limp as a spaghetti noodle.

And what really drove me to tears (I did the crying inside the showers) was that he didn’t speak a single word all the while that we were there lasting maybe 5 hours. His lips were dry, he had “a strawberry tongue” and a swollen throat – all symptoms of Kawasaki Disease.

The guy directly above me here, Jun Velasco, whose snippets of literary prose would always inspire me to “out-write” him, had texted me bon voyage moments before I was to board my plane in Puerto Prinsesa.  Minutes before, he called to invite me to an intellectual forum in Cubao at 6 that evening.

He texted me again when I arrived in Manila about 2 p.m. and, after telling him I couldn’t make to the forum because of Mayo’s condition, the good Samaritan in him resurfaced and offered financial help.

The professor was deeply touched, Jun, when I showed her your text message.  A tear dropped, I guess, after she had read it, turning away as she pulled a hanky from her bag.

“Please tell Jun, God be with him,” she said, her back turned, blowing her nose into her hanky.

Makati Med is expensive enough but listen to this: My grandson, 3 days into his confinement, received vaccine vials at 10 p.m. the day we arrived at a staggering cost of P155,000. 

As I write this, the process might be repeated after 22 hours if there’s no marked improvement in Mayo’s condition. God forbid because, again, it would cost us another P155,000 for the medicine (intravenous gamma globulin).

Jun Velasco and I aren’t rich like most journalists in this country, where newspaper work is truly a labor of love much like choosing a life of painting Mother Nature and about social consciousness the way Dayong, Mayo’s father who finished Fine Arts at UP-Diliman, did.

“Tatay, I’m sorry I’m zero,” Mayo’s father said to me outside the hospital room, almost teary eyed himself. 

I can understand that. Artists are almost always zero.

His wife is zero, too.

That, too, I can understand as she is no scion of the Henry Sys, Lucio Tans or even the Zobels and the Ayalas, if not the Gokongweis.

Mayo’s disease has no warning. Like an earthquake, or a tsunami, it comes unannounced.

Most often, artists depend on the kindness of strangers, not to mention God’s mercy.

Thank you for the prayers – and more.

Share your Comments or Reactions

comments

Powered by Facebook Comments