By HERBERT VEGO
FOR a full 17 years and five months, my brother Efren savored 17 years and five months of “bonus life” until death did us part on June 23 this year at the age of 62 years and nine months.
What I mean is that he could have died at the operating table in 1997 yet at age 45. He was ready for that, knowing he had pancreatic cancer.
However, he lived on to be part and parcel of the modernized social media that we know today as Facebook on the Internet. His FB page attracts attention because of his head “implanted” on the body of a robust torso; and another head on the formally-attired US President Barack Obama delivering a speech. A backdrop behind the “implants” are these words: “Nothing other than my last breath can end my life. We learn from different sources but we get the best education from diversity. Even a turtle, if it never gives up, can finish the race.”
Efren Legaspi Vego finished the race ahead of us his siblings, breathing his last at 4:30 a.m. on Monday. He had expected it even much earlier while pinning hope for longer life.
In January 1997, my 45-year-old brother heard life’s most deafening news while confined at the United Doctors Medical Center in Quezon City, awaiting surgery after he had been diagnosed to be agonizing from cancer of the pancreas. It was his doctor speaking: “I will make the last four months of your life as comfortable as possible.”
Doc’s verdict must have scared Efren more than his eight-centimeter tumor. It could only mean that, despite the impending surgery, his disease would end his life within four months. In that case, why would he have himself operated on?
Not liking what he had heard, he scouted for a better surgeon. A fellow police officer, Nick Caba, referred him to Dr. Celso Fidel, a military surgeon at the AFP Medical Center, who candidly told him about studies revealing that “only one in a thousand pancreatic cancer patients worldwide survive Whipple’s surgery.”
Whipple’s is a complicated surgical procedure aimed at cutting away the almost inaccessible head of the pancreas.
With or without surgery, a pancreatic cancer patient could enjoy only six more months to live.
“I’ll go for it,” my brother answered, knowing he could not even be one of the lucky “one in a thousand” if he refused to go under knife.
On January 27, 1997, Dr. Fidel and his team of military surgeons performed an eight-hour operation that removed the ampullary mass at the head of his pancreas, including his gall bladder and portion of his stomach.
After his surgery, he applied for disability retirement that would entitle him to a monthly pension big enough to support his family comfortably. He was a cop assigned to the Quezon City Police Office.
In lighter moments, his friends would kid him about life being unfair to good cops. It’s the bad ones – especially protectors of drug lords and crime syndicates – who live longer.
Efren, a good cop, has already proven them wrong. Since that surgical procedure, my brother Efren has added 17 more years to his life and more life to his years together with his beloved wife Amparo and their children Walter, Cheryl and Honey; and on many occasions with us his siblings, namely Herbert, Jesse, Azucena, Jasmin and Randy.
He also cherished his high school classmates, using Facebook as venue to organize annual reunions.
On May 2 this year, he posted a message that he might not be around to attend their May 3 reunion in San Jose, Antique due to failing health.
The following day, he posted another message declaring that he had recovered and was strong enough to fly from Manila for the reunion. He arrived there on time and hugged everybody, whispering, “Let me hug you for the last time.”
Our brother Efren was rushed to the Commonwealth Medical Center in Quezon City on June 11, 2013.
Rather than be instructed, he instructed his family and his doctors to do away with all “human intervention” whenever his debilitating health could not take it anymore.
He returned to his creator at 4:30 in the morning of Monday, June 23, 2014.
He will be cremated today to immediately fulfill the Biblical injunction: “Dust thou art and to dust shalt thou return.”/PN
