“Yolly, what is this?”, the frantic voiced I heard pass 2:00am of August 22, 2008. I saw my father holding his bloodied nose as more traces of fresh blood was visible on the floor. I pretended to be calm dealing with such an emergency. I let him sit and dabbed clean his bloodied nose as I scanned our old medical book for information. I told him to pinch his nose against the bones of his face using his thumb and index finger, then lean slightly with his head tilted forward. Teasing him about his failure to take an early morning bath eased the panicked in his eyes. She took a bath on that unpleasantly cold morning but the warm water I prepared thwarted the chilling effect. I did not tell him though that nose bleeding is also one sign of hypertension.
Insisting on manning his store instead of taking some rest, he opened at 6:35am. By 8:15am, my son informed me about the incessant bleeding again of my father’s nose. As I kept my cool telling my sister Liza, she panicked and immediately went into my house to check our father’s blood pressure. The 80 over 100 reading was enough to relieved us.
With Liza in tow, my father consulted a doctor on August 26. Liza shouldered the doctor’s fee but left me the cost of the laboratory tests for ECG, urinalysis, CBC and X-ray. My financial difficulty was overshadowed by God’s help, thus the successful laboratory test on August 30, 2008.
My father is now 74 years old and counting. Although he can’t control his anger sometimes, this incident taught us to be more careful with our own health, and the importance of saving for the “rainy days”.
