Trini Christmas present

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

TWO SATURDAYS ago, I had a tumour removed from my oesophagus. I got out of the Intensive Care Unit (so-called because that is exactly what you might need at short notice) on Monday evening and out of hospital itself one Friday ago.

Not to tempt Providence, as Standard English would express the concept, or to jumbie anything, as we would say, it seems I’m likely to live a bit longer.

It was touch and go, though. In spades. If my procedure was a plane flight, it would have been the most turbulent ride of my life. Apparently, a major blood vessel broke almost the minute the surgeons opened me up. An operation that should have lasted six hours ran to nine, the first three spent just making sure I wouldn’t bleed out on the table (and, if I did get off said table, blood would get to the parts I needed to heal).

To safeguard against cancer spread, two-thirds of my stomach was removed. Where there was once a baggy pouch, there is now a thin sleeve. (I’ve been given, incidentally, unrequested, the stomach reduction surgery an Arab Trini friend called “the Syrian Diet.”)

So, going into my first Christmas weekend in Trinidad in years, I’m indifferent to almost everything that defines it. I can’t risk parties, the cinema, a bara stand. Between the pre-surgery chemo blasts and the post-surgery antibiotic blitzkrieg, my immune system has been shot to bits, like an art dealer in Blanchisseuse.

Nor can I literally stomach the famous Trini Christmas food. Except possibly for pastelles, I can’t even consider eating any of it yet. I’m just beginning to move from baby food to chewable. Swallowing a slice of ham would be like swallowing a cyanide pill; the clove would just be the cyanide on the cake.

I won’t miss liquor. Running a Christmas drunk when I have to pay so much attention to the healing process – it sounds pretentious, but it’s real, and vital – would be like an already drunk driver finishing off the bottle of rum before getting behind the wheel of the car.

I especially could not give a flying firetruck about the parang (but I didn’t need to get cancer to form that opinion). For the first time in my life, I could do with a little quiet rather than a lot of music.

So my Trini Christmas will be honoured more in the breach than the observance of its traditions.

Including presents.

I don’t expect anything under my mother’s tree, but not because, post-surgery, I’ve gone all bah, humbug!

It’s because I’ve got all I need already.

In any sphere of human endeavour, the good thing about the removal of the fat is that it exposes the bone, if you’re willing to look.

Deprived of sorrel and turkey, denied a rum and a poncha crema, even unable to peck on the cheek under the mistletoe, I’m reduced to my own essentials this Trini Christmas.

Strip away the PlayStation5s and iPhones, too, and this is all you get: the breath drawn in and exhaled and repeated until it stops. This is the meat of life. Everything else is just gravy.

Two Saturdays ago, to remove the cancerous cells in my body (Merry Christmas Geoff F), my right lung was collapsed. X-rays show it to be in about one-third or one-quarter darkness (to my ignorant eye).

Accustomed to polishing off a 12,500-step daily goal before breakfast, I’m struggling to get to 7K, even with two staged rests to pat strangers’ neglected dogs through their garden gates.

You just don’t get to full acceleration with a soft tyre.

The gift of life is the gift of breath and I’m labouring to draw air deep into my right lung like a Maraval householder in heavy rain, slapping down sandbags desperately as the river rises.

But Mark Pereira, who gave his life to the art of TT, and had his life taken artlessly for nothing, bled to death in his own home. He lies only in our memories now.

So I know I’ve got the only worthwhile present there is.

And I’m in the process of opening it.

Merry Christmas.

BC Pires is passing the pastelles, sidestepping the sorrel and turning off the parang. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com