Amoeba Diaries (July 22,2008)

Amoeba Diaries
By: Maria Reylan M. Garcia

Acute Gastroenteritis with mild Dehydration and Amoebiasis. This was my doctor’s diagnosis. This was the reason why I was absent from school for several days. This was the cause of my week’s worth of misery and downheartedness. Half of me wanted to grab my schoolbag and temporarily forget about my 40°C fever, abdominal pains and irregular bowel; but the other half wouldn’t even give me the force to get up from bed. I didn’t exactly know what hurt more, my wounded intestine or the anxiety of missing some hours of lecture. Illness jumps in front of you without any preliminaries, the next minute you’ll see yourself shivering in bed, a thermometer on your underarms and doting parents pacing back and forth twice as worried. But for me it was different, I knew I was going towards that stage, I knew I was overstraining myself, I knew I was overdoing it.

A week before the menacing amoeba made his multimillion family within my intestines, was a week of exams. I slept an average of two hours per day and did nothing more but eat, breathe and study. I was too insensitive of my personal needs as I was too focused on my personal aims. My parents never forgot to remind me, but there I was deceivingly reassuring them that I can still handle things. Because of my reckless and imprudent dreams of gaining high grades, I ended up making a waste of everything I have prepared for. Studying is absolutely a good thing, who doesn’t want to earn honors and distinctions. But taking care of one’s health is of higher importance. Thus, I failed to prioritize.

Needs, everybody has them. But in order to keep everybody in tip top shape and balance, everybody has to know what needs are to be satisfied first. I need to pass my course and I also need to watch out for my health. Both of them are certainly and without question vital to my life. But health weighs more, and must be fulfilled before I could start fulfilling my dreams of becoming a professional. How would it be possible for me to continue studying piles of study notes if I couldn’t even open my tired—exhausted eyes to begin with? The same goes to any circumstance; it is rightful and most important to prioritize. Here is a lawmaker assertively passing some ridiculous bill on birth control while his hometown is now a barren wasteland after a calamity. He might have overlooked that the country is not overpopulated, and his people is in need of basic commodities. Like me, the lawmaker failed to prioritize.

We have a lot to face everyday, and I must admit that long before my gastric pains I believed I could finish everything up all at once. I had that fantasy of studying two chapters of Microbiology, another two lectures of my Nursing subject and a chapter of Philippine History all at the same time. I had that delusion of spending the rest of my college days within the perimeters of my study table doing only two things, breathing and studying. I had that hallucination that I could gobble every subject and squeeze them inside my brain so I could get a high grade every exam. But those were just fantasies, delusions and hallucinations of an amoeba infected seventeen-year old. It’s about time I should refresh myself about the existence of the words schedule and organize; who apparently are first-cousins with the word prioritize.

We fail to prioritize once in a while; from choosing a pack of junk food over a nutritious piece of apple to choosing to spend the rest of one’s life unemployed over a blissful working career. Yet, the unmistakable point is, there is always a choice and we must base this choice according to what we perceive to be more important and much more essential for us to carry on with life. It took me several days off my routine and a lingering threat of missing such a number of schoolwork to realize an ironic thought. What I’ve been anxiously working for brought me to the exact situation I was trying to avoid. Now, I’m back to almost square one, I know it would be hard as I have a lot of catching up to do.

Yet, as of the moment, I’ve learned better.
Thanks to that intestine invading amoeba.