Saving graces

We make mistakes. We trip. We fall into pits and wallow in cesspools that threaten to drown us.

We commit blunders. We lose face. We lose a part of ourselves.

And then saving graces turn up suddenly — sometimes inexplicably  — that win the day for us.

Sometimes, a saving grace wins us back our life.

* * *

When we were in high school I was intimidated by Patty Trinidad. During school plays, she was the director, the captain of the ship. I was the scriptwriter who had to adjust to her. She was an excellent dictator. Brilliant. But you had to be ready for the sparks that flew from her lips when she was upset.

During our velada for the 25th anniversary of our graduation from the Assumption Convent high school, only smiles and words of grace emanated from Patty’s lips. She was different. And she was very careful about her diet because she had just undergone a kidney transplant.

 She had become a renewed Christian.

 “I turned my back on God when my marriage failed in 1991. I went back to Him in July of 1997 because I knew that problems with Him around is waaaay better than no problems without Him,” she tells me.

It wasn’t her illness that led to the resurrection of her faith.

“The transplant didn’t change my outlook...It was my return to the Lord the year before I got sick that changed my outlook,” Patty recalls.

When her doctors told her that she needed a transplant to survive, Patty searched far and wide for a compatible donor. None of her siblings was a match. She was desperate, and one day, she just collapsed in tears. Her yaya, Babe, then 21, asked her when she would get well.

“When I get a new kidney,” she confided to Babe. “‘Yung mga kapatid ko, hindi compatible ang kidney nila sa akin.”

“Eh bakit hindi ninyo ako tinanong?” Babe asked the weeping Patty.

Patty looked at her incredulously. This woman who wasn’t even of her own flesh and blood was willing to give of herself to stop Patty’s tears and make her smile again.  Patty decided to take her up on her offer.

And whaddayaknow — they were a perfect match!

Patty’s transplant took place in July 2001. She was discharged on her birthday.

“She didn’t ask for money at all in the beginning. She was even a bit insulted when I asked her what she wanted. She didn’t even understand the question. All she did was see me cry once,” continues Patty.

“That she volunteered her kidney is one of the miracles I prayed for and that is what strengthened my faith and outlook in life,” says Patty, who was with a management consulting firm for 28 years before she embarked on her own two years ago as a trainer and management consultant.

She is leading a full and fulfilled life, thanks to the unconditional gift from her former househelp.

Sometimes, in life, we need not even ask — our saving grace just pops up out of nowhere, tossing us the lifeline that will take us back to shore when we’re gasping for breath in the rough seas.

 (Babe now has three kids, and due to the prodding of relatives, did ask money from Patty later on — which Patty could have refused. It does not diminish to me the selflessness and nobility of Babe’s donation because when she put her life on the line on the operating table to give Patty a new lease on life — she asked for nothing in return. )

Truly, God is everywhere — in every man.

* * *

My sister Geraldine and her classmates used to kid each other in medical school that they would not know who among their seatmates would one day save their lives, or the lives of their loved ones.

Geraldine belongs to the UP-PGH Class of ‘94 and among those in her class was Nick Nicomedez. After passing the board, she specialized in Psychiatry and Nick, in Orthopedics. When Nick’s charitable mother-in-law, the late Angge Alday Soriano (one of my mom Sonia’s BFFs) had outreach projects, Geraldine would send her medicine samples.

Fast forward to 2015 and our own mother had a serious accident at home, breaking her left thighbone into two. She was in such excruciating pain she had to be injected with strong painkillers and rushed by ambulance to the hospital. And Nick was holding clinic at the exact same time my mom was wheeled into the ER and so he was able to go down to the ER to check on her.

Having Nick attend to her was already therapeutic for Mom. Who else to entrust her life to than the son-in-law of her BFF?

Geraldine was in constant touch with Nick, and just before the surgery, when he and his fellow bone surgeon Dr. Jose Martin Paiso told my sister Valerie and me that the procedure had a small risk of cardiac arrest, he also spoke to Geraldine.

Then we waited on bended knees and bated breath.

* * *

The 2 ½-hour operation was a success. Nick and his team were Mom’s saving graces.

 It’s been a month now and Mom is raring to walk again although she is not yet allowed to put weight on her injured leg. She feels no pain. She undergoes physical therapy regularly with the patient and cheerful Jeffrey Punto.

Geraldine flew to Manila while Mom was recuperating in the hospital. She then held a thanksgiving party to which she invited some of her classmates — all real-life saviors from different fields of Medicine. 

God doesn’t promise us a life free from pain, sorrow, mishaps and pitfalls. But what He promised are saving graces — and they come from near and far, in faces we see and don’t see, in loved ones and strangers. In surgeons and househelp.

(You may e-mail me at [email protected].)