When I was a child, doctors and hospitals were practically unknown. I don’t remember being treated by doctors or admitted in hospitals. Not before I was in grade school. Our parents, perhaps because of poverty, rely on home remedies and the services of quacks.
While we were living in the upland. I remember being choked by a fish bone. To dislodge the fish bone, my father gave me ripe banana to ate. But the fish bone did not dislodge even after eating several fingers of banana and drinking several coconut shell cups of water. Desperate, my father resorted to quackery by having my throat pawed softly by our pet cat, but to no avail. To distract me from the excruciating pain, he brought me to the movie house in the urban center of Kolambugan. I must have enjoyed the Rogelio de la Rosa black and white movie since I forgot about the lodged fish bone and the throbbing pain in my throat was gone when we got out of the theater.
When we transferred in the lowland near the urban center of Maigo, our parents continued to get the services of faith healers in times I and my younger brothers and sisters got ill. (I am the eldest of nine children).
I remembered Iya Teria, the favorite traditional healer of the family. Her yamyam (muttered incantation) and maragaya (medicinal rice) were supposed to cure all kinds of illnesses. She recited her abracadabra as she spat chewed rice on the patient’s head, showering the parietal whorl and the surrounding hair with bits of saliva and cereals. The healing sessions rarely vary regardless of the illness. Her cure took light years to take effect but somehow I eventually got cured of my colds, coughs, dislocated bones, boils and carbuncles. But on one occasion, I asked her to speak louder so that I could get immediate relief from the excruciating pain in my ass, swollen with a boil. She ignored my plea, so when she was gone I took the fate of the boil into my hands. With one hard and snappy thrust of an empty bottle I forced the boil to rapture. I saw stars in my head at the impact of the bottle’s mouth on the blister, forcing out the “eye” of the boil, but the respite from the throbbing pain afterward was worth the trouble. Drained of pus, the boil shrunk.
