The plug of service to human life

(Second Part)

When I first started to write for the Philippine STAR, I remember having jotted some lines from a book Praying With Pope John Paul II, authored by His Holiness, first published in the USA in 1996 by Charis Books. The reason I noted the lines was because I had visited a friend in a hospice in the US and had been given the book by her sister, a nun also living in the States. It really is a book of prayers, and after reading the book last year, I wanted to write about the humanitarian business of running a hospice, which could be more fully developed in the country, but never got around to it.

Writing about M-Tech now, I thought the following lines germane to the "special services" this modern facility in the Philippines offers, for instance, the Pain Clinic, the Smoke Cessation Clinic, Dialysis, Oncology, etc. Quoting these lines now, I can see how appropriate they are for the Pain Clinic that M-Tech so expertly handles: "The sick, the handicapped, and the dying teach us that weakness is a creative part of human living, and that suffering can be embraced with no loss of dignity. Without the presence of these people in your midst you might be tempted to think of health, strength, and power as the only important values to be pursued in life. But the wisdom of Christ and the power of Christ are to be seen in the weakness of those who share His sufferings." The extraordinary facility that is the M-Tech Diagnostic and Therapeutic Center is located at Jupiter Street corner Paseo de Roxas St. in Makati. It charges very reasonable rates and has a Cancer Care Clinic especially created for special people who need special care. This involves the concerted efforts of a group of professionals whose objective is to provide specific medical care and physical, mental and spiritual support needed by the patients and their families in an integrated manner. It is indeed soul satisfying to know that while M-Tech does have the great expertise to provide the required technology in cancer treatments, it is very definitely the caring touch of its medical staff that will help the cancer patients and their families manage the disease. In my conversations with Dr. Angelita Reyes, chairman of M-Tech’s mother corporation, I remember her precisely stating that she would like the center to be known as it is now for the professional palliative care that its Cancer Care Clinic provides in all critical dimensions. I can imagine the warmth and gentleness with which these patients are treated, for when I visited the center because of a mere allergic cough, though a very obstinate one, there was no way one could miss the expert touch and the gentle care. For that matter, the Pain Clinic M-Tech has organized helps patients suffering from different sources of pain to improve their quality of living through a coordinated approach towards pain alleviation and relief. Actually, their present clinical set-up enables every patient to benefit from their multi-dimensional management approach. What is quite important and critical too is the fact that they maximize the use of drug combinations through different routes of administration tailored to the patients’ individual needs.

One of the most important things we as Filipinos should try to conserve and nurture is the generous, compassionate spirit of the Filipino. Probably a decade ago, I saw an old friend who had become a telecom lawyer and was doing consulting work in the Far East. He had been a seminarian at one time, wanted so much to remain a missionary in Calcutta, India, and had in fact personally met Mother Teresa. He got "so drained," he said, from ministering to the sick that he had to stop. He could not take it anymore. He was however so saddened, in fact broken-hearted, that he could not do missionary work anymore. He said the rare God-given gift to find joy and derive strength from ministering to the infirm and the dying that he felt he had been endowed with, was just not enough to sustain him for he was truly "drained." Joining the ranks of the materialistic world of telecom lawyers, he practiced his profession in Hong Kong but had become very restless and forlorn until he adopted a little blind two-year-old undernourished orphan girl and named her Teresa in honor of Mother Teresa. Being a 56-year-old bachelor, he made Teresa the center of his life and she is now a happy, healthy, literate and intelligent 11-year-old. His friends sometimes do not even notice she is blind.

The best gift little Teresa gave him, aside from enriching his life, was killing his restlessness and sadness. Life now has real meaning. The void in his guts has been filled. The strong compassionate spirit in him has achieved fulfillment. His thirst to give which had been stirring within all these years since he left missionary work has been quenched. He was happy. I think he knew so well the import of Pope John’s words when he said: "Let us keep the sick and the handicapped at the center of our lives. Let us treasure them and recognize with gratitude the debt we owe them. We begin by imagining that we are giving to them yet we end up realizing that they have given to us."

This is exactly what the young capable crew at the M-Tech Therapeutic and Diagnostic Center are doing right now. Sure M-Tech is in business, and certainly the effort to keep their balance sheet healthy is important, but it is evident that every functionary at M-Tech, aside from working with great enthusiasm and scientific expertise, works with a dimension that is soul-satisfying to say the least.

At the Neurodevelopmental Clinic for instance, emphasis is placed on providing early identification, diagnosis and intervention for children with developmental disabilities and those children at risk of developing such disabilities. It is M-Tech’s aim to assist the child to develop to his fullest potential in partnership with a multi-disciplinary team, with parents and caregivers. The philosophy is nurtured that each child is unique and develops in his own unique way. As he grows and matures, he will progress at his own pace in comparison to his peers. The center recognizes the fact that disruptions at any stage of development may disturb a child’s normal process of growth which may lead to cognitive and emotional problems later in life, so that the Neurodevelopmental Clinic puts emphasis on a specialized interdisciplinary approach in the assessment and evaluation, as well as care management and care for children with special needs. The team therefore focuses on issues involving the etiology or causes of the delay, the child’s prognosis, and the best possible course of treatment. Early diagnosis and intervention offer a child with special needs a better chance to develop to his fullest potential.

I certainly like their philosophy; I like their approach; and am impressed by the fact that the provision of healthcare services, specialized though they may be, consisting of preventive, creative and rehabilitative measures and programs, are found in a "one-stop-shop" center. For the purpose of nurturing this philosophy, M-Tech has indeed invested in the latest state-of-the-art medical equipment to be able to provide the most accurate diagnosis and the best treatment possible. They are an investment – equipment like CT Scan, radio fluoroscopy, mammography, sonoline ultrasound, teleradiology, endoscopes and cautery machine, Dameca anesthesia machine with Datex monitor, panoramic and general x-ray, general dentistry with peri-apical x-ray, state-of-the-art operating microscope, etc. The abovementioned modern medical equipment were developed due to technological brilliance, with the promise that human life which for so many centuries had been, in the words of the late actor George Burns who lived till almost a hundred years and died not too long ago, "nasty, brutish and short," now can be "more beautiful, comfortable and long."

When I see young people today, like college freshmen, wandering around holding their umbilical cords looking for some place to plug them in, I want to tell them that a lot of people they are going to encounter in this world in the next number of years are not going to be whole, they’re going to be broken, so that as very young men and women, they have to find the right plug, hopefully the plug that the young men and women of M-Tech have found – the business of assuaging pain, the plug of service to human life.