Trapped

.

THE past few nights, I’ve been trying to force myself to sleep through my frustrations, even wishing to wake up the following morning to the realization that it was all a nightmare. But I keep waking up throughout the night, waking up from dreaming about what I realize is very much real now. I often fight the urge to point a middle finger up to the sky.

Escape

AND so I found myself in Radiology of Cardinal Santos Medical Center, a couple of days before Christmas, awaiting my turn for an X-ray for a long overdue checkup with my orthopedic doctor later in the afternoon. And though Cardinal’s all renovated now, with spanking new setups at each department, making things much more efficient — Radiology, for example, has its own cashier! And there’s a Seattle’s Best around the corner for crying out loud! — there’s something about sitting alone in a waiting room amid sullen others that turns back the clock 10 years, to when a “fuzzy area” in some X-ray slide told me that my life would never be the same.