A Tale of A Totally Jej Mishap and The Impostor Wife

By Will on June 6, 2014 • ( 0 )

In our primary internal medicine text book it is said that for oncologists, the main dictum of practice is not “first do no harm” but rather “first hasten to help”, which is kind of weird considering that one of the main reasons I chose this field is that there is no real emergency that would interrupt sleep or a comic book break, at least not in a way that a cardiologist needs to run after the golden period of thrombolysis, or a gastroenterologist needs to clip those spurting esophageal varices. Still, while a few hours or a few days of delaying chemo might not change the prognosis significantly, just thinking of those dang invisible tumor cells possibly swimming in the blood stream and lodging themselves in the lungs from a foot melanoma makes me feel totally aligaga.

A few weeks ago one of my high school teachers came in with stage 4 lung cancer, already with poor performance status and in horrible pain, and you could tell by her greeting upon seeing me for the first time after 17 years– “mamamatay na ko!!!”– that there is an urgency for some kind of intervention. After a few days I’ve successfully administered chemo, and while she suffered a few expected adverse effects from the drugs her lung mass has significantly decreased in size and more importantly, the severe chest pain has totally disappeared.

And I could have probably done the chemo a few days earlier, if not for the jeje mishap with the drug delivery. The drug company shipped the drugs via 2Go, but I haven’t received the fucking drugs on the expected day. I’ve waited, and waited, and called up the company, and after twenty phone calls and twenty “we’re investigating it” ‘s, I was finally informed that the drugs were indeed shipped out but were delivered to the wrong address. Said drugs were received by the person in the wrong address, who has promptly introduced herself as… my wife. I have not blown my top in a long time, but I could just imagine what the eavesdroppers in Dakasi SM Sta. Rosa might have been thinking when I screamed over the phone, “I don’t care what happened to your delivery, I need you to give me a new set of DRUGS! I need those DRUGS now! Give me a new set of DRUGS now!!!”

I was eventually given a new set of drugs later that day which I’ve used immediately and which lysed the tumor wonderfully. I’ve lost contact with the company and never got new info about my Impostor Wife, but whoever she is, I take delight at the chagrin she must have had when she opened the attractive giant styrofoam box only to discover tiny bottles inside. In fairness to her, “Ondansetron” does sound like some new low-end gadget with which she could take some jeje selfies.