In the Operating Room, In the Same

IN THE OPERATING ROOM, IN THE SAME THROES OF WAITING

by Zymon Arvindale R. Dykee

Ihad my appendectomy on May 27, 2021. It was the first surgery I had to undergo, so you could imagine how fearful I was. Fearful not only of the post-op complications I could suffer but of the financial burden that would likewise follow.

It was almost noontime when I was escorted by three nurse assistants from my room on the sixth floor of the hospital to the operating room on the ground floor. I was expecting that my father would tag along and be by my side throughout the operation. But hospital protocols as well as pandemic-related restrictions forced him to stay and wait in our room. So I went out, aided by the nurse assistants, first on a wheelchair and then on a gurney, to the operating room, where they left me all by myself.

I lied on the gurney while staring at the bright white ceiling. When I had the guts to slightly shrug off my gnawing apprehension, I examined the room. It was spacious. Every counter was meters away from me. At the center of the room was the bed on which I would eventually lie and have my distended appendix removed. That bed was right beside me. Hanging on top of it was a huge lamp. I

would find out later on that the fluorescent lights on the ceiling would be turned off, and that huge lamp, with its equally huge lightbulb, would brighten the room as well as my body so the surgeon could clearly see my insides. I couldn’t stare at the bed for too long. It signified that the very first and most serious medical procedure I would experience at a young age of 23 was getting closer and closer. It also exacerbated the dread that had been creeping up on me.

I was interrupted from fighting my emotions when the door opened and another nurse assistant in blue scrubs entered the room. I couldn’t clearly see her face since she was wearing a mask. But I could glean from her that she’s young and short, probably as short as me. I got up from the gurney and looked at her. She said she had entered the room because she needed to inform me that the surgeon hadn’t arrived yet. That meant I had to wait longer. That meant I had to keep on enduring the persistent pain emanating from my appendix, and the torturous agony I had been harboring since I was admitted.

But I had to tell her I understood. So I said okay, but out of sheer nervousness I also let out an unnecessary laugh. For someone who’d undergo surgery of course it would come off as strange to laugh. So it wasn’t shocking when she asked why I was laughing. Right then and there I told her I was scared.

She sat on a chair beside the door and asked, Bakit, ano po ba’ng nangyari sa inyo? That short and single question prompted me to share everything to her. I started feeling ill four days before my surgery. At first I thought the sudden rise in body temperature was a side effect of my Covid-19 vaccine, which I received on May 20. So I shrugged it off and took paracetamol to feel better. The next day, my temperature dropped to normal, but I felt unusually groggy. I had to forgo some physical activities since I was lacking energy. Then at midnight of May 26, the lower-right side of my belly started to ache, as if an invisible blade popped out of nowhere and pierced right through it. The pain did not go away. As I shifted in bed to feel

comfortable, I used my phone to search online for the possible causes of the pain. All accessible medical articles pointed to appendicitis, the inflammation of the appendix. I spent the entire night quietly enduring the pain until it turned awfully unbearable that I awakened my father and stepmother. I told them what was happening to me and, in the gentlest and most careful way possible, said it might be appendicitis. My father advised me to take paracetamol once again and sleep on my left side so that the pain would subside. I did everything he said and got to sleep at four in the morning, but not without struggling. At 6:50 a.m. I was awakened by much sharper pain. This may sound like an overstatement but I did feel like I was dying. I screamed for my father to come to the bedroom and, as I held my legs near my chest like a fetus, begged him to bring me to the hospital. On that same day I was diagnosed with acute appendicitis. On that same day I was admitted.

I kept on letting out occasional laughs as I shared my story to the nurse assistant. In hindsight, I realized that laughing was my way to placate myself and think of how absurd my situation was. But the nurse assistant was quiet the entire time, with sporadic nods and mmms to indicate she was listening intently. After I finished sharing my story, she started to ask questions. Over time these questions became more and more personal, with topics ranging from my current endeavors to my family. When she asked about my mom, and when I told her my mom was a nurse in the U.S., she started sharing her story.

She told me she had applied for a worker’s visa to the same country. She had been waiting for it to be approved so she could fly out of the Philippines. There was a trace of impatience in her voice as she shared her experience, perhaps to emphasize how long she had been waiting. Twenty-seven na ako, eh, she said. Then she added that she’d been working in the hospital for a long time. But in her stay there, she had grown weary of the workplace injustice she had been facing. She admitted that the wage was low, and her career, which

was once a dream, turned into a cumbersome endeavor. She might not have said it to me directly, but I could pick up from her tone that the pandemic had worsened her case. It seemed like she no longer wanted to be in that situation, in the same room with me, because she felt deeply undervalued when she should not be. Her soul was already elsewhere, probably rolling in the hundreds or thousands of bucks U.S. hospitals could offer, but her body was stuck in an unsympathetic hospital in an unsympathetic Philippines under an unsympathetic kakistocracy. But she had to keep working, because what else could she do while waiting for her visa to be approved? What else could she do when she needed to earn money for herself and her family amid a global health crisis?

Every time she spoke, there was a sense of hesitation that manifested in her trailing off. She must’ve been not only weary but wary of the consequences of this revelation. I wanted to assure her that her secret’s safe with me, but I couldn not do so because at that moment I had been dealing with gastrointestinal pain and sudden astonishment at the gravity of her situation. At some point in our conversation, however, I was able to wish for the immediate approval of her visa. But that was all I could muster.

It took me nearly a year after my appendectomy to realize that we were in the same throes of waiting at that time in the operating room. I was waiting for the surgeon to arrive and put an end to my appendicitis, while she was waiting for the moment when she could get away and be financially stable in another country. Both of us were burdened and linked to each other by precarity, and all we could hold on to was the promise of a better, kinder future. Waiting, it then occurs to me, is a liminal space we unwillingly enter. It pushes us into a state of torment before we move to the point we envision ourselves in.

Before I could get to ask for her name and thank her for inadvertently pacifying me, a woman in white, possibly a nurse, had

entered the room and announced that the surgeon had arrived. The nurse assistant stood up from her seat and went out the door. As she left the room, the nurse in white instructed me to lie down on the other bed. I did what I was told. Then the nurse assistant came back with a male nurse assistant and a man in red scrubs. That man turned out to be the anesthesiologist. She and the nurse in white prepared the room for surgery while the anesthesiologist, with the help of the male nurse assistant, administered spinal anesthesia to me. My body from the waist down started to feel numb. As I struggled to raise my feet up, the surgeon, covered in white personal protective equipment from head to toe, entered the room and asked if I was ready. The room was suddenly alive and raucous. Before I could even make sense of everything, the anesthesiologist had administered a sedative through my IV line. It took only three minutes for me to be knocked out. That was the last time I saw the nurse assistant. F