My grandfather, the barrio doctor

I wrote this tl/dr Facebook post three years ago, in the thick of the pandemic lockdowns in the Philippines. It came up in my memories on that social media platform, and I still think this story is worth telling.

Night deepens and I remember now one story my mother told me about her father, an opthalmic surgeon by specialization, a barrio doctor by choice.

“My father told me he got paid in chickens and eggs and with fruit and vegetables, but he didn’t regret going around the country’s barrios setting up clinics and treating the sick — and not just for eye complaints, since he was a GP and general surgeon before specializing in opthalmic surgery.”

He was a barrio doctor when World War II reached our shores and, when there wasn’t any clean water with which to wash his hands, my mother’s story goes, “he would douse his hands and arms with iodine, his upper body, too, if he had surgery to do that day.”

During the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, my Lolo Pepe had to treat one patient who had an anthrax infection and was at death’s door. He had no medicine left in his doctor’s bag. So he found a way to extract arsenic — yes, the poison — and to use that to treat his patient. The patient outlived him by almost six decades. Not having any ready medicines, he said after that, was no reason not to find a way to treat the patient.

Now, don’t go thinking my maternal grandfather was a saint. He wasn’t. He was also a sabungero and a babaero. About 18 women calling themselves “Mrs. Tan” were crying at his coffin, the family tale goes. This doctor was human and, despite his peccadilloes, he was a damn good doctor who, my mother said, was scathing of city doctors who couldn’t operate outside an operating room. He did, and he didn’t lose patients that way. He lost patients mostly to malnutrition and undiagnosed underlying conditions that weakened their bodies and made it that much harder for them to fight for survival, even with his help.

Many of the people whose lives he saved outlived him by decades. I even met one or two of these people as a reporter covering the health beat.

My grandfather did lose patients and, when death defeated his every effort — including his innovative use of our pharmacopeia and traditional herbal medicines where there were no drugstores, just plenty of medicinal plants in the wild — he would turn to pretty young barrio lasses for comfort.

My mother said she’d thrown that in her father’s face, his womanizing, when he came to see her and called her his masterpiece (she was made in what is now Ozamiz City).

His answer was gentle, she said, and very pained and raw: “When you have to look at your patient dead in your care, then you tell me what it takes to ease the pain. Tell me I am doing things wrong. If you aren’t going to fight with Death himself every blessed day and learn to live with losing to him, then don’t tell me what to do.”

My grandfather was a barrio doctor in a country where drugstores were for the fancy rich folk he’d been born to, not for the poor and underserved. Medical supplies in his service areas were nigh on impossible to get unless you ordered them specially from Manila. A lot of the time, he had to use regular sewing thread for his sutures, this man who topped the medical boards of Germany and Japan because his first attempt at passing the board in the Philippines resulted in a failing grade.

That same cussedness benefited Dr. Jose Tan’s patients among the poor and unserved when he was able to finally practice medicine, and he practiced medicine with barely any support or equipment.

I understand one of his small clinic huts is a hospital now. I don’t know what it is called or where it is, Mama wasn’t sure, either. That medical facility could very well be called into COVID-19 service if this pandemic gets worse.

My mother was hopeful I would be a doctor. My science grades and overall average grades across my mid-grade school to high school years would have made it easy for me to study medicine. But learning the theory and putting it into practical use are two very different things.

I don’t have my Lolo Pepe’s fortitude to take Death on and survive losing patients in the process. He saved more lives than he lost. I would lose my life if I lost a patient, I wouldn’t be able to cope.

These stories give me an insight into the situation our medical frontliners are going through right now: They are fighting increasingly difficult odds.

I am a barrio doctor’s granddaughter, and I grew up listening to my mother’s tales of the hardships in the poor rural areas, stories of how my grandfather would take his winnings from the sabungan (fighting cock pit) and spend them on his poorest patients. Stories of how he always set up a small apothecary wherever he moved, often building the structure with his own hands out of bamboo, so he could make medicines his patients could take. Tales of how horrified his wives would get when they learned he’d spent money from his own pocket to buy food for a patient, or that he’d given the payments in kind by other patients to him to his hungry patients without telling them first.

It takes a special heart and soul to be a doctor like my grandfather, a medic like our frontliners. My heart is not that tough.

I am saying a prayer for our health workers who are out there, working against unpromising odds. You are all so brave. Thank you for upholding your oaths of service. May Bathala bless you and keep you.