A year ago today at mid-afternoon, I was at work when I received the phone call that turned my world upside down. It was my husband saying he fell to the floor as he was trying to get to the bathroom and couldn’t pick himself up. There was fear and urgency in his voice so I immediately summoned our children, one of whom lived nearby. 

That morning he had opted to stay home when he would normally drive me to work. He said he had a terrible headache, which I attributed to the sweltering heat. Only later did I realize he must have been exhausted from various activities the past week, including shopping for our daughter’s wedding which was to happen in a few days as the centerpiece of a huge family-and-friends outing. He had also driven 10-plus hours to and from Baguio, all by himself, to attend to some urgent matters.  Only later when I was looking back did I realize these were just a few of what could have triggered this thing that was unfolding. 

When I put the phone down, I saw that there were at least three missed calls from his number before the one I answered. I stopped what I was doing and rushed home.

When I got there, my daughter was attending to her father, who was still seated on the floor beside the bed, too heavy for her to lift up. She made the calls—to her then brother-in-law-to-be who happened to be an ER doctor at the Diliman Doctors’ Hospital (DDH) and to the barangay (village) calling for an ambulance to bring him there. Around two hours after his phone call to me, my husband was in the hands of doctors who ordered the MRI and CT-scan that confirmed our worst fears: he had a stroke.

Before midnight, he was admitted into an ICU room. Visitors were allowed only for an hour or two a day. I headed home in those early morning hours to what was to me the scene of the disaster. Clothes and other stuff strewn over our bedroom floor, spaces emerged where the neighbors moved things so that the stretcher could pass, delivered food still unpacked and uneaten, the remains of a life before the stroke. 

It was a hemorrhagic stroke, we were to learn later. A bleeding in the brain, that weakened the left side of his body. It is one of two types of strokes, the other being ischemic or a blockage in the brain that deprives it of blood and oxygen. A hemorrhagic stroke is less common than ischemic and more likely to be fatal, unless detected and treated early. 

The early action and treatment paid off. He could hardly move his left limbs, and he would crumple to the ground if he as much as attempted to stand on both feet, but he was not paralyzed. He needed help with simple and routine bodily functions, but he was conscious, lucid and verbal, to the delight of doctors and nurses who kept asking him questions about how the stroke happened. He indulged everyone and anyone who asked, with a tale of that nightmarish afternoon when he tried to stand but felt instead like he was sliding down an abyss, and how he climbed out of it and survived, thanks to his heroes and heroines (his family members). 

Actually, he became talkative and observant while confined—two days in the ICU and six days in a regular private room. Once, he asked me, “Was there someone who died while I was in the ICU?” 

I replied, “Yes, remember we heard women wailing, and I managed to peep and saw a flatline in the monitor of the other room.” 

“That’s a good visual. Crying plus flatline equals death,” said my husband, who once imagined himself to be a documentary filmmaker. 

He noted that his allergic rhinitis disappeared during his days in the hospital. “Some allergies are psychological,” he thought aloud. “I wish the reverse could happen. Psychological factors can also make you better.” 

He took to thinking aloud a lot in those days, reflecting on his life-altering experience. “Maybe we still have a mission,” he told me one time. “I hope to see Lulu,” he said another time, referring to our at-that-time yet unborn granddaughter. “And I hope she becomes a chatty little girl.”

He was often praising the doctors and staff of DDH, which he called his happy place, only to rethink that label. We shouldn’t call a hospital a happy place, he said, but it was to him. The hospital was clean and the medical staff competent and professional. At one point he even commented, as the orderly was changing his sheets, that they looked like they were newly pressed. “Is that a bedsheet? It looks like it came straight from the ironing board?” he asked.   

For most of this stay in the hospital, he would urinate with the help of a catheter which he called a space invader. We were reflecting on our botched plans, including a trip to the US later that year, which he said should push through, because “If I could make it there, I’ll make it anywhere!”

The way my husband responded to his stroke gave us hope and lightened what would have been a distressing family catastrophe. We were thankful to have had the network and resources, plus HMO benefits, not to mention PhilHealth and Senior Citizen deductions. We have never been so grateful to be senior citizens. Somehow, we managed to pull through, thanks to the generosity of our children, their spouses and other family members, who not only provided material support without being asked but also showed compassion and empathy in many ways. 

In times like this, the concept of “family” becomes tangible, with some of my husband’s friends showing him how they can be more family than blood relations can ever be. They show up when he needs them and engage him in conversation, which is crucial to a stroke survivor. Keeping the mind working, through conversation, is always on the doctors’ list of prescribed activities. Of course, it is the patient who must do the talking. I have tried to alert him to relatives who call him but do not let him speak. I often see him in what is supposed to be a “call” where the caller is a “Marites”* who never even lets him utter a word and hardly even inquires after him. I encourage him to get a word in edgewise, doctors’ orders.  

A stroke patient needs motivation to recover. For some, it is the need to earn a living that helps them bounce back. For others, it is a perceived mission, or a sense of community and belonging. My husband says it is good to belong to a community of his peers as well as family who keep him afloat. The alternative is to sink: depression normally sets in after a stroke, his neurologist warned. 

The routine of doctors’ checkups and physical therapy sessions took over our days. He was prescribed and is still taking more than 10 different kinds of medicines, and I remember days and nights I spent sorting through the pill boxes. We made friends with someone from the drugstore who takes our orders by text and gets them ready for the delivery rider to pick up. We managed a retinue of helpers and caregivers that included, at one point, a physical therapist, a private duty nurse, two caregivers and a household helper.

We are blessed and we do not forget it. We live in a city where there are enough neurologists for stroke patients, where good hospitals are equipped with state-of-the-art medical equipment. Circumstances converged to help my husband survive. Some of our friends and acquaintances, mostly men past 60, like him, were not as fortunate. He lived to see his first grandchild born. She is now a healthy seven-month-old baby girl.

A year has passed since that day, and we are still picking up the pieces of a seemingly long-ago life. Plans have been put on hold and obligations and tasks suspended for now. We never got to attend the wedding of our daughter, who for a long while provided her father with ready meals ordered from healthy-food caterers. One son took us under his wing, while another provided for our needs from afar. We’ve also added acupuncture to the routine because, why not? We’ll do whatever it takes to aid in my husband’s recovery, besides which he gets to talk to his new friends, the acupuncturists. 

The scenes from that day a year ago are as clear as though they are still happening before my eyes, like a Netflix movie you could summon on demand. Many times over the past year I’ve played back the images: the phone call, the daughter attending to her father, the son who also showed up in response to his mother’s summons, the good people from the neighborhood who helped carry the husband to the ambulance, the barangay personnel who attended to him while inside the ambulance, and the staff of the DDH-ER, where frontliners were already waiting when the ambulance arrived. There are blessings to count and that is what marking this day is all about. ###

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*A “Marites” is a Filipino name nickname used to identify someone considered a gossip. It’s an abbreviation of the question: “Mare, anong latest (Friend, what’s the latest)?”