Be still...

I woke up with a start. I had been trying to sleep for a few hours after arriving home from a family trip to Epol in Marilog (in the mountain area of Davao City), sick to the bone with a rather nasty strain of flu, but rest would not come easy because I was having chills and I was coughing and sneezing constantly. When I finally I did doze off it was to a fitful state, and after only a few minutes I woke up with a start: I was having difficulty breathing, and I felt like I was drowning.

I got up out of bed to tell my wife – who was in the shower at the time – what I was feeling, and she immediately knew what it was: “You’re hyperventilating, Jon. Just relax. Breathe slowly.” She knew what she was talking about: when she was younger she had frequent bouts with hyperventilation, and early in our marriage we had to rush to the emergency room once because of it. It took a while before we realized what was happening to her: according to Webster, hyperventilation is “rapid shallow breathing that provides the body with an excess of oxygen and a deficit of carbon dioxide. It most commonly occurs as a manifestation of anxiety or hysteria.”

Well anxiety and hysteria are just words until you go through them, and I went through both and ended up in a panic as I battled with my first bout with hyperventilation. It felt like the more I breathed, the less oxygen I could get, and that made for a vicious cycle that drove me further into what I can now only describe as insanity. My wife – not quite done with her shower and hair still dripping over hastily worn shirt and shorts – had to rush me to the emergency room to calm me down. On the way I was screaming at the top of my lungs, and I became so irrational that I wanted to either sleep or die on the spot just to get rid of the awful feeling.

It’s a funny thing about hyperventilation: you think you’re not getting any air when you’re actually getting too much of it. It can be triggered by any number of things (stress, sickness, excitement), and at its worst it can lead to panic as the mind begins to think it’s not getting any air. Like I said, it’s a vicious cycle: the more you gasp, the more oxygen you get, and the worse off you are. Oxygen is absolutely necessary to keep us alive, but too much of it trips the brain into overdrive and can literally drive you crazy.

But for all its complexities and seeming contradictions, hyperventilation, as I found out at the emergency room, is easy to treat: just put a brown paper bag over your nose and mouth, breathe, and relax. The paper bag makes you breathe in your own carbon dioxide and rids your body of excess oxygen, but it’s the “relax” part that’s crucial: unless you decide to believe that this overly simple cure will make you feel better, the panic will not go away. It is rather counter-intuitive because the body wants to gasp for air, but relaxing is the only way to get rid of hyperventilation. “Relax, be still,” my wife repeated to me over and over as I struggled to breathe into a paper bag.

Relax. Be still. There’s got to be a life lesson there…

Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

When troubles afflict us, our instinct is to fight, move, do what we can to solve the problem. In our own power, however, such movements add up to no more than the flailing of the arms that only dig us deeper into the mess. It’s like hyperventilation: the more we fight, the worse off we are.

Be still, God says, and know that I am God.

It’s not being fatalistic, or hanging up one’s gloves and giving up: it’s understanding that God is in control and that only when we let Him guide our paths will we ever win over our troubles. I’ve been through my own share of trials and tribulations, and I’ve learned that it never profits me to try and fight them on my own: God has to be there from the beginning, and I have to learn to be still and know that He is who He says He is.

“He makes wars cease to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow, and shatters the spear. He burns the chariots in the fire.

‘Be still, and know that I am God.’”

Say it ain't so, Lea!

My wife Dadai loves Lea Salonga. She’s been a fan since she was a child and Lea was first a teenager slowly singing and dancing her way to local celebrity status in “That’s Entertainment” and then, all of a sudden, a young woman shooting to international fame in “Miss Saigon.” She has followed Lea’s career as best she could, and she still harbors a grudge against her youngest sister for having met Lea in person on a trip to Cebu last year. She rejoiced when Lea got married and got pregnant, but these days Dadai is disturbed: apparently, Lea Salonga is single-handedly pushing back all the efforts and advances that have been made in the campaign to promote breastfeeding by making public her difficulty in nursing her child and her apparent plan to give and switch to formula this early.

I broke that news to my wife on the night that ABS-CBN did that news feature on Lea. The teasers during the newscast were, as expected of the network, sensationalized: “ANG MALAKING PROBLEMA NI LEA SALONGA SA PAGIGING INA!!!” and “LEA SALONGA, MALAKING PROBLEMA ANG HINAHARAP SA PAGIGING INA!!!” The last line, of course, was intended as a word play on breastfeeding (“hinaharap” being a Tagalog euphemism for a woman’s breasts). I wondered what the big problem could be, but when that latter teaser was given I figured out it was about breastfeeding, but I fervently hoped I was wrong.

As it turned out, I was right: Lea was agonizing over what she felt was her low supply of milk and that she was not giving the right amount to her newborn. In the interview, she said she was having a difficult time nursing her baby and felt her baby was suffering for it. But the bad part was this: she was apparently planning to bottle-feed her child and justified this by saying she herself was bottle-fed “from the get-go.” She said bottle-feeding a baby does not mean a mother loves her child any less, and that is true: no one can judge a mother’s love for her baby just by the fact she bottle-feeds him or her. However, Lea is unwittingly playing into the lie that many mothers have fallen into: that their milk production is somehow inadequate and that they have to supplement this – if not completely replace it – with formula.

The irony is that early this month, the City of Manila hosted a record-breaking mass-breastfeeding affair aimed at popularizing breastfeeding and making it known that any mother can do it. The gathering (which ABS-CBN unfortunately spun into an erotic affair by saying, “LIBU-LIBONG INA, NAGTOPLESS!!!), held on May 4 at the San Andres Sports Complex, had almost 4,000 mothers simultaneously breastfeeding their children, and they were all there: rich, poor, young, not so young, celebrities, masa, you name it. Health Secretary Francisco Duque said gatherings like that are important as they “bring into the consciousness of the general public the obvious but often neglected advantages of breastfeeding.” The event was organized by the City of Manila, Children for Breastfeeding (an NGO that promotes family support for pregnant and breastfeeding mothers) and the Department of Health, with support from UNICEF.

The UNICEF website quotes UNICEF Representative in the Philippines Nicholas Alipui as saying: “The malnutrition situation in the Philippines is devastating. The situation can be reversed with simple but effective measures. The effort to break the Guinness World Record is one such measure.” Children for Breastfeeding director Dr. Elvira Henares-Esguerra said it was “also a form of protest against false advertisements of milk companies influencing mothers to think that their product is similar to breast milk.” UNICEF says less than a third of women in the Philippines exclusively breastfeed, but the government hopes to reach the Millennium Development Goal of 65 percent by 2015. Alipui said UNICEF will be working with the national government, local government authorities, and NGOs to raise the level of breastfeeding to at least 50 or 60 per cent. “Even then it would not be sufficient, but it would help us begin to transform and reverse the malnutrition problem in the country,” he said.

Unfortunately, what 4,000 mothers did in that record-breaking gathering may have been pushed back by that single interview done by one mother, Lea Salonga, with ABS-CBN which made it appear that breastfeeding is an impossibly difficult activity that should be ditched as soon as the first hint of pain or discomfort is felt by the mother. My wife breastfed our son for two years and two months and she will tell you that yes, breastfeeding is not easy, especially at first, but it’s not impossible. Our son took a few days before he could get used to nursing, but my wife kept at it and didn’t give up. In the end her efforts were rewarded with a healthy boy who’s extremely close to his parents. To be fair, Lea did not say she was giving up on breastfeeding, just that she was thinking about it. We’re emailing her through her website to remind her that she is being looked up to by millions of Filipinas, and that she can do a lot to help them by not giving up on breastfeeding.

Rite of passage

My son is going to hate me for writing about this, but yesterday he finally entered manhood by having his, er, final cut. It was a little early, in my opinion: he’s only 11 and entering sixth grade, and back in my day us boys didn’t get circumcised until we were about 12 and entering first year of high school. But apparently all his classmates were getting circumcised this summer, so to save him from being teased endlessly we scheduled him for his rite of passage. Before his day or reckoning I told him the story my father told me about his circumcision: it was done by the neighborhood barber, using a labaha that he sharpened with a piece of leather.

The tuli was done in groups, with the boys lining up before the barber squatted on the ground. There was no anesthetic, and the boys were made to chew on some guava leaves that they would place on the wound as a disinfectant. The labaha was positioned on top of the thingie, which itself was propped up on a guava branch; the barber then hit the labaha with a block of wood, splitting the skin in two. The braver of the boys spat out the chewed guava leaves and put it on the wound, while the lesser ones swallowed the lot. After that the boy-men would be made to run around the neighborhood and then, finally, jump into the river. The boys went home clad in saya, and the tradition was that they would be given all the nice food they wanted while healing.

That was a far cry from how tuli is done now (and during my time), I told my son, when all a boy has to do was enter a clinic, lie down, feel a slight pinch from the hypodermic needle injecting anesthetic, and wait. The worst part is no longer the actual circumcision but what comes afterwards, when the wound heals, and even for that there are medicines to make the process easier and faster. Our helper, however, startled us when she said her husband was the one who circumcised their only son: he used a blade (which he apparently didn’t even sterilize) and simply sliced the foreskin. No anesthetic, no cauterizing, no nothing – just like in the old days.

See, I told my son, you’re so much better off. All this, however, did little to assuage his fears, so much so that it had to take two trips to the doctor to get the whole thing done, the first one having been botched by all the squirming he did. I guess it’s natural: I’ve been to a few operation tuli programs and have seen big boys running away out of fear. I’m just glad it’s all over for my boy, and the worst part – the actual healing – is already on its way.

my erpats

My older brother Arnel and I used to call our beloved father "Erpats." Not to his face, though; it was kinda like a code word, something we used only between ourselves. Tatay was Tatay when he was around, but when he wasn't, he would be "Erpats." It's a little irreverent but familiar, akin to the American slang the old man." It's a kanto word that is also a term of endearment.
Erpats was a good man, a nice man, a great man. In this blog I will write about him often, and I think I will see just how much of him I have become...

erpatshood

I love telling the story of when my son, Daniel, was born. My wife Dadai and I had taken Lamaze, and so I was inside the delivery room to coach her on her breathing. But at the crowning the doctor told me to move by her side to see my child as he/she came out, and so I did, and that has meant all the difference in my life. For when I saw my child come out, I felt like I was also being born. I felt like a new man, and a new man indeed I was. I was no longer just Jon Joaquin, the husband of Dadai. I was also Jon Joaquin, the father of Daniel.