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I go to Mercury Drug each week, and each time I see these faces, queuing in front of the counter with a look that is both hesitant and indignant but ultimately resigned and begging for some small comfort they know will never come from the pharmacist staring them down.
They stand there, holding a piece of paper in one hand and a worn-down purse (they may as well use a plastic bag) in the other, sad, helpless, like they’re clawing through straws, furious, trying to climb up, though they probably know they’re grabbing at nothing but air. They seem to me like they’re drowning in air.
They’re the poor who, already deep in debt trying to make ends meet with a budget of less than a hundred a day for an oversized, very extended family of 12, has had, by some cruel trick of fate, to deal with a father or a husband or a grandparent who has tuberculosis or has suffered a stroke.
So, they line up in a drugstore with money borrowed from a loan shark or charged against their future salaries, so they can buy that antibiotic or pill that costs as much as a week’s worth of the food they are already in short supply of.
Call me emotional, but I think the biggest lie Big Pharma is making us swallow is that we don’t deserve to live if we can’t pay up because good health – with all the research and marketing that go into it – costs money.
It was a cruel joke; Baz Luhrmann’s kind, the kind that blindsides on an idle Tuesday. I was locked, loaded and ready for that three-week vacation that was sedating my mind like an opium-induced dream and spicing up my pathetic moss-watching existence when it hit. I suddenly felt bloated and heavy, like a balloon that’s about to burst. The pain was searing, and it was creeping all over my abdomen like a pissed-off python.
The joke was, it struck just hours before my flight from Singapore to Manila. Just moments before, my head was swimming in a nice haze that pretty much involved a white, tropical beach in Batangas, a full-body massage at The Spa, and “nature-tripping” around Makati and Timog avenues with some dirty old friends from college. It was my sweet escape from the sweatshop, my chance to refurbish that bubbewrap of self-esteem my toxic boss had methodically stripped away.
That dream went “poof!” when my insides went “pop!”. Instead of a hammock on a beach in Batangas, I wound up on a bed in some second-class hospital in Paranaque.
