Bahala na!

by Nestor C. Punay, MD

SO MANY times when confronted with difficult situations, we often chose the easier way out. We chose to ignore it and pretend we do not care. "Bahala na!", I'd like to say. We often kid ourselves into thinking that it has nothing to do with us. And every Sunday in Church, we pray that it would go away.

I could think of a hundred and one ways why "Bahala na!" is dangerous to your health. But I would sound like a parrot and condescending if I would name them all. Still, I think you might learn a thing or two if I would briefly talk about it.

As a resident in internal medicine in Cebu, I was often frustrated with patients coming to the emergency room in the wee hours of the night. I had no problem with the timing of their ER visit. What frustrated me was the duration of their illness. About 99.9% of the time, their symptoms had been going on for days, even for months! Over and over, one would get the story that symptoms are ignored at first. Then, they would consult the "manghihilot" (quack doctor). Once their condition become worse and unbearable, then they would come to the hospital. Sadly, it was too late for many of them. It took me a while to understand why.

Most of our patients were poor. For them, consultation with a doctor is a luxury that they could not afford. In their mind, twenty pesos is already a fortune. They'd rather use that to buy rice for their family than "waste" it to pay for health services ? including the fare to come for free consultation to a government hospital. (During my time it was free. Nowadays, there is a different policy in place.) But I quickly realized, this was just one of the many facets to this problem.

Not long after I started my residency have I gotten used to the reality that a lot of our people are indifferent to their body and are fatalist in more ways than one. But who can blame them? After all, so many of them faced the daunting task of survival from sunrise to sundown. Pain is integral to their very existence. I could not really blame them if they chose to say "Bahala na!" and pray to high heavens that it would all go away!

Lack of education is probably a factor that plays a significant role in this problem. But even for the educated ones, I have observed the same attitude. This bothered me. It points to the fact that health workers, including doctors are partly to be blamed for this. More often, we forget that the best medicine is prevention. We are so engrossed on our belief that we are helping people by curing them. But are we? For many of us, giving out prescription is enough to fulfill our duties. Sadly, we do not even bother to talk to patients about their condition to make sure they understand. Often we are cognizant of this problem. But we chose to ignore this. We try to convince ourselves that we could not do anything about it. We then embrace a system we know is not right. So, we throw our ideals and beliefs away. And in doing so, a part of us dies. Pretty soon, we become robots programmed to fulfill certain tasks mindlessly. But in times of solitude, we try to confess to the Divine Being of our own shortcomings. Every morning we faced ourselves in the mirror and realized we hated the grotesque residue of ourselves.

"Bahala na!", for life must go on. *