One good leg

My friend Rica and I have this running competition. Whenever we bump into each other, usually in the English Department in Ateneo where we both teach, we launch into a litany of complaints about our lives. It’s a contest of pain, whose is worse, and I usually lose. But the last time we spoke, about two months ago, I thought I’d finally won. I had just recovered from a particularly nasty spell of gout. “Do you know what it’s like,” I said, indignant and righteous, “to have one good leg?” She was quiet for a few seconds.

Then I remembered why I never win this contest. She didn’t speak, but I could read her thought bubble: Do you know what it’s like to give birth, not once, or twice, but three times? To bring up three feisty kids, one of whom has special needs? To suffer debilitating migraines? To serve as director of the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings on top of one’s teaching duties? While trying to get a PhD in UP besides? And singing for a choral group? Before I could continue, she gave me a look both incredulous and indulgent, the kind teachers give students who’ve just said something dumb but don’t realize it.

If I think about what she’s gone through, and still goes through, I realize which one of us has the weightier burdens. But when do we ever think of others when we’re in the throes of our own pain? Pain paralyzes not just the body but our powers of sympathy.

I know it’s hard to feel anyone else’s pain when my gout flares up. A kind of arthritis caused by the buildup of uric acid crystals in the joints, gout usually hits me in the feet. A prickling sensation blossoms around the ball of the foot or the base of the toes. If I don’t recognize it quick enough, the tingling becomes a stinging, as if a hundred tiny needles were sinking ever so slowly into the joints. Then the swelling hits, and the joint balloons like a fat sausage. Then the pain, the exquisite pain. The tiny needles, now deep in bone and tissue, turn into knives, and the stinging blows up into the stabbing of a hundred rusty blades. If I take my meds (a pill or two) early in the process, I can head off the worst. If I don’t and the worst comes, then I have no choice but to take the full dose: a pill every hour until the diarrhea hits. I drink an ungodly amount of water (a treatment I call water torture). The pain eases, but I have to take frequent trips to the toilet. (I hope you’re not eating breakfast.) A good night’s sleep becomes impossible.

As I wait for the pain to ease and the swelling to subside, I hobble about the house on one good leg and a cane. Maybe two days after the medication starts, my foot no longer looks like human longganisa and I can put on soft sandals. Maybe I can walk out, limping only slightly, to one of the small restaurants on Maginhawa Street to relieve myself of cabin fever. I might even be able to go back to school and resume the routine of a productive member of society.

Gout, I’ve found, is less an illness than a condition. You just have it, or you’re predisposed to it. My father has it, and so do two other brothers. “Aren’t you too young to have gout?” people asked, the first few times I’d show up in school in flip-flops and with a cane. No, I say, my youngest brother got his first attack at age 29. (Mine hit at 36.) Of course, his fondness for Red Horse probably had something to do with that. He has since cut back on the booze.

Me, I’ve cut it out entirely. Yes, I like the taste. I still fondly look back on the three weeks in Toronto my wife and I stayed in 2010. The variety of beer was amazing, and it all tasted great. I drank nearly every night. But I’m at that point in my life when taste isn’t the most important thing when considering what to throw down my gullet. Of course, my students don’t agree. They’re still in indestructible teenager mode, and they think it’s horrible to put stringent limits on gustatory delight. When I posted an article on a class Facebook page about the health hazards of potato chips, one said, “I’d rather die than give up potato chips.” Well, I’ve come to realize that many things that kill you — alcohol, booze, cholesterol, nicotine, dysfunctional relationships — don’t do the job right away. They make you suffer first. I like being free of pain, thanks.

So it’s goodbye, beef and pork, especially the fatty parts (It was lovely knowing you, sisig, but alas, we must part), shellfish (Oysters Rockefeller, you will live on in my dreams, I promise; and I will always cherish the memory of you, bilao of fresh oysters during my honeymoon), sardines, mackerel, and lamang loob (Giliw kong dinuguan, paalam). Pile on the veggies, please.

I’ve also made the discovery that, should you reveal your condition to others, you will not want for advice. Glenn, who teachers in the Fine Arts Program, is a fellow sufferer, and once when he posted on his Facebook page that he was suffering gout, in came an avalanche of comments telling him what pills to take, what foods to avoid, what teas to drink. I messaged him expressing my sympathies, having been at the receiving end of much well-intentioned but ill-informed counsel myself, and we’ve been exchanging notes since.

Whether a condition or an illness, it’s an intimation of mortality. Wait, no: it’s a hammer blow. I once imagined my swelled-up foot saying to me, as I sat on the toilet bowl thinking what a wretch I was, “The end is gonna come, buster, whether you like it or not. Prepare.” And so I do. As the years go by I feel more and more that I’m “fastened to a dying animal,” as Yeats put it memorably, and that the line between well and ill gets thinner. You put more and more effort into making sure you don’t tip over into the other side. I’d rather not watch what I eat, but when the alternative is near-debilitating pain, saying no to lechon, even as the many feasts of the Christmas season approach, becomes surprisingly easy.

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