Not a small triumph August 22, 2006

I spoke at St. Luke's Hospital last Friday to a group of people who were either asthmatics or who had kids that were asthmatics. For some reason, the people who invited me thought I might be an inspiration for them – an ex-asthmatic who ended up not doing very badly in life.

It did make me recall my bouts with asthma when I was a kid. Life has a strange sense of humor and gave me a couple of afflictions that cartoonists often like to make fun of: asthma when I was a kid and gout when I became an adult. Asthma has gotten to be depicted as beggar's or sick man's opera, with all the wheezing or whistling sounds it produces, and gout, well, that's the fat man with the fatter toe imbibing wine and dining opulently, a cautionary tale of effect and cause. It's funny -- only of the asphyxiating or needling kind.

I became "suki" [regular customer] to a neighborhood doctor from repeated bouts with asthma. (A doctor at St. Luke's would tell me "suki" is the exact same word most asthmatics used to refer to themselves from their frequent visits to doctors and hospitals.) Then there were no powerful medicines to appease the wrathful gods of asthma, you had to flounder in the raging waters while clinging to the fragile raft of breath for days on end. That is the perfect image for it: Asthma gives you the sensation of drowning. Those who do die from asthma -- and there are still many -- might as well have drowned, on dry land.

I remember that sometime in Grade 1, during the season of rains, I had to quit school for a couple of months as a result of being kept to bed often. My parents didn't mind if I repeated the grade despite the drain on very scarce resources it entailed if that was what it took to keep me alive. At the end of those two months, the officials of my school agreed to see if I could catch up after the long absence. If I did, no need to repeat. Of course, I did. What can I say? "Buti na lang magaling ako."

Asthma had bad and good results on me. The bad included a slouch that I would learn later was not entirely the product of sloth. An X-ray would reveal I had a curvature at the top of my spine, the product of reclining on piles and piles of pillows, which is what an asthmatic does while in the throes of an attack. You cannot lie down flat on the bed, you'd drown. You sleep in a half-sitting position.

I was tempted to attribute my wretched voice to asthma, too, but I've heard asthmatics talk and sing, and many of them have pang-karaoke voices. Alas, I can only attribute my voice to bad luck.

Socially, it robbed me of the joys of summer and Christmas for a while. Summers were a time for the kids to go out and play at night, in particular what Tagalogs call "patintero" or what Bicolanos call "turubigan." The latter name owed to the lines of the squares in the game being made from water drawn from the canal. To hear the gleeful shouts of the other kids emanating from some part of the neighborhood while you languished in infantile detention was torture. It was the same thing with Christmas when the other kids roamed the streets caroling. I don't know that I would have improved the aesthetics of the cacophony of voices that rioted in the cold night (oh, yes, nights were still cold then), I do know I'd have known the meaning of Christmas.

The good was that I read and read and read. Of course, that wasn't all attributable to asthma, that was also attributable to personal inclination. Asthma, and the fact that a sleepy town like Naga offered little by way of diversion (no TV and the movie houses changed movies by eons), merely supplied the opportunity. My curiosity and the school library supplied the motive and means. Asthma as well drove me to introspection, compelling me to deal with the wonder and awe of that human phenomenon called breath.

The affliction disappeared as suddenly as it came -- sometime in Grade II or III, I'm not sure now when. I never tried exotic cures, though there was no dearth of people suggesting lizards, snakes and monkeys. What can one say? Asthma is dangerous to exotic animals. (That's the case with gout, too: you'll hear no end of bores telling how to deal with it when you are listening to music and imbibing gout-inducing spirits. What can I say? Gout is painful in more ways than one.) I did try playing basketball since all the kids in the school I went to did. I never learned the damn thing (to this day I can't dribble). But all that getting knocked down, which took the wind out of me, must have brought the wind back to me.

I don't really know that there's any inspiration to be drawn from surviving asthma any more than there is from surviving any affliction. Or the inspiration you can draw from the one applies to the other. I suppose it's how you deal with adversity that really matters, whether the adversity is genetic or social.

The doctor who spoke before me rattled off some of the people in history who had asthma but went on to do great things. One of them, to my surprise, was Beethoven. You do learn something every day. He was a very good example, I thought -- and told my audience-of someone who triumphed over adversity. Beethoven wasn't just an asthmatic, he was also deaf. How long he was an asthmatic I did not know, how long he was deaf I did know, which was pretty much during the height of his musical powers. You can't be more cursed than that, to be a musician and to be deaf. But Beethoven did not decide to slink into a (literal) silence, he decided albeit often irascibly to blow heaven's trumpets into this world. It was during his darkest moments that he composed his masterpiece, possibly the grandest music ever made on earth. That is the Ninth Symphony.

What can I say? Winning is never about overcoming others. It's always about overcoming yourself.
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