Staying alive at 70

By Herbert Vego

 

A FEW days ago, I woke up feeling unusually dizzy. My neck was in pain. It took a few minutes before I managed to sit up with my head propped up against the wall. I reached for my blood-pressure monitor. The reading was a high 156/106.  I, therefore, gulped my medicine, hoping to recover immediately so I could catch up with my work deadlines. But I just could not get my brain running.

What bothered me at that time was whether to have myself confined in a hospital. Not so fast, I thought while texting Dr. Florentino Alerta for a check-up appointment.

After checking me with his stethoscope, he said, “You will be okay.”

I felt even much better right after getting a piece of his prescription sheet. It heaved a sigh because it was clear I was not “ripe” for hospitalization.

The hospital is one place I would not like to return to anymore especially in this COVID-19 “season”. I had been there a number of times and found it inhospitable, always draining the money that had taken my bank account many months to accumulate.

I realized I had turned 70 years old, which is the average lifespan of Filipinos.

Finger pressing my aching neck, I asked myself, “Where have all the good old days gone?” It seemed only yesterday when I was a young one, aspiring for a successful future in journalism; now I am young once.

I consoled myself with the determination to stay alive, remembering what King David had said about the “bonus years” that men who stay alive after age 70 are entitled to: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10).

I can’t afford to stay sick. A journalist has a “till death do us part” covenant with his profession. While it had already been 51 years since I started working as a journalist, I could not afford to stop and live a sedentary retirement.

The vitamin advertisement “Bawal magkasakit” strikes at the core of the bitter reality that the average senior citizen eventually dies poor in our country – no thanks to expensive medicine and hospitalization. My late parents, both educators, had exhausted their retirement money while confined in the hospital. My father died of lung cancer; my mom, of an accident.

If I were working in the West – say the United States or Canada – I would not worry about dying poor. The government would foot medical and hospital bills.

On second thought, I am still luckier than some of my classmates who have already gone to Kingdom Come.

I checked my memory for confirmation that my brain is still in place, recalling that time when I could not type the e-mail password that I had been using for five years.

To prove myself wrong I mentally recalled the names of my classroom teachers. I succeeded in naming all my teachers in the elementary grades but not all in high school and college. I wondered whether early memories die last. I researched.

I recalled those days with my late great grandfather Catalino. I was a pre-school kid in the 1950s when I accompanied him to the grave of his wife Felipa. That done, he said to me, “Better to have lived and died than not to have lived at all.”

Those words still ring in my ears as I try hard to believe in the afterlife. It’s healthy food for thought that only God-believers may claim.

-oOo-

ANOTHER WIN FOR MORE

ANOTHER legal fight between incumbent energy distributor MORE Electric and Power Corp. (MORE Power) and its predecessor Panay Electric Co. (PECO) is all over.

The newest legal victory of MORE is a decision from the Iloilo City regional trial court (RTC), branch 24, granting it the possession of PECO’s assets through expropriation.

It’s another feather added to MORE’s cap. As everybody knows already, the Supreme Court had earlier affirmed the constitutionality of the law (RA 11212) granting MORE the franchise to energize Iloilo City.

The ruling is contained in a decision penned by Judge Nestle Go of Branch 24, who also denied four motions of PECO against MORE Power, including two filed by lawyers Eldrid Antiquiera and Leone Gerochi.

Gerochi also filed a related intervention which the Court likewise dismissed.

In the Omnibus Order, Judge Go ruled the contentions of MORE Power “meritorious” and granted it the possession of PECO’s assets classified under “Category C” in the expropriation case filed by MORE Power against PECO.

The “Category C” assets include the business building of PECO, two guest houses including a canteen in General Luna, the property known as the Mandurriao stockyard, and a property along Duran-Gen. Hughes St. known as the site of PECO’s future substation.

The Court noted that the Energy Regulatory Board (ERC) had confirmed the said assets as part of the distribution system of Iloilo City.

“Since MORE Power was given a franchise as a distribution system under Republic Act No. 11212,” the Court ruled, “it can expropriate properties which are needed in the efficient establishment, improvement, upgrading, rehabilitation, maintenance, and operation of the distribution system.”

A reading of the aforesaid law shows that the power to expropriate is not limited to the mere distribution assets used in the distribution system owned by PECO but also includes property necessary for the maintenance and operation of the distribution system. The Category C assets are vital in the maintenance and operation of the distribution assets.

The judge thus saw no merit in PECO’s claim that only properties used in the distribution system should be subjects of expropriation.

The expropriation case was originally by a different branch under Judge Emerald Requina-Contreras, who inhibited herself from the case after she had issued a partial writ of possession in favor of MORE Power in February this year.

PECO went to the Court of Appeals twice for a TRO to stop the expropriation case in the Iloilo RTC. The Court of Appeals denied the TRO and  rejected PECO’s argument that the pendency of the case on constitutionality of RA 11212 was a valid reason to stop the expropriation case.

When the writ of possession was issued, PECO went to the Court of Appeals for the third time for a TRO to stop the implementation of the writ of possession.

The Court of Appeals did not issue a TRO, prompting PECO to file a supplemental petition with the Court of Appeals, but to no avail.

In December 2019, the Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order against the Mandaluyong RTC’s judgment declaring void and unconstitutional two sections of RA 11212.

Last September 15, the Supreme Court in an en-banc session finally ruled on the constitutionality of MORE Power’s franchise, essentially ending the 96-year monopoly of the Cacho-owned distribution system in Iloilo City.

It was also a victory for MORE’s Ilonggo lawyers – Hector Teodosio and Alyana Babayen-on — against the Manila-based luminaries on the other side.

PECO’s only sensible move now is to either peacefully accept or contest in the Iloilo regional trial court the MORE’s offer of P481,842,450 as “just compensation” to PECO, based on the latter’s tax declaration.

Well, the amount is no peanuts kay dugay na nabawi sang PECO ang iya investment.