A kid’s battle, a Cordilleran’s heart

by Ramon Dacawi

(SunStar-Baguio, Monday, September 11, 2006)


SENIOR citizen Harry Basingat marked his birthday inside a bank last Friday. He counted money which he wired for a 10-year-old girl who will most likely spend hers in a hospital.
Monday morning, Yam Bayogan, who will turn 11 on October 18, will have her plane ride, a short, one-and-a-half hour flight from Davao to Manila flight.The girl’s appointment with doctors at the Asian Hospital and Medical Center will still be on Tuesday yet.

But she needs time. For rest and priming up hope. And for prayers before her decisive battle against cancer starts.The disease, diagnosed last May yet, is hardly for kids. It attacks mostly adults aged 65 and over. Acute myelogenous leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow, is rare among children. Acute because it develops fast.

It took sometime for her parents - Jonathan and Emma Ruth Bayogan and her older siblings John, 23; Joseph, 21; and Janice, 14 - to stop asking why it had to be Yam. Acute. Early on, the teacher-couple knew the disease develops fast. Time is running out. Early on, they were told a bone marrow transplant increases the prognosis up to 80 percent at her age and condition.

Early on, they were told the procedure would cost between P2.5 to P3 million.Jonathan turned to the Internet for help. Basingat, an Igorot expatriate in El Monte, California, is still mourning the death of his wife Mary. When he heard Yam's plight, he posted it on his bibaknets@yahoo.com Internet site and on igorot-IGO@yahoo.com.

“This is just an added push for the plea,” he wrote members of the two websites. “Yam is hanging on to dear life.”Harry admitted his wife’s recent passing on gave him a different perspective about life and death. “I seem to have grasped the real meaning of death. Something that I ever believed in my past life - and that is, death is not something to fear when you think you have satisfied your purpose and believe that you have made the most out of it.”

Yam’s relatives in Tadian, Mt. Province, other Igorots and Cordillerans from all over responded.“With God’s amazing grace through you - her army of benefactors, supporters, prayer warriors, friends and relatives, she will conquer this disease, then go on to live the normal life that we all desire for here,” Jonathan e-mailed last week.Yam, an honor pupil who writes as Eunice Joy in her quizzes, will begin her medication on Sept. 14.

She will be admitted on September 17 for another round of intensive chemotherapy prior to the bone marrow transplant.John, her donor-brother, will start his medication for stem cell on September 20. Transplant will be on September 25. She will be in the hospital for six weeks.Post-transplant check-up will be weekly for 100 days. Most likely, she’ll mark her birthday in the hospital.“So Yam and her Mommy Emma will stay nearby until early (next) January,” Jonathan said. “Daddy Jonathan stays until the end of September then goes back to work, (visiting) now and then.”Jonathan and Emma taught for years at the Benguet State University before moving to Davao. Emma now teaches at the University of the Philippines-Mindanao, while Jonathan is on his last year as president of the Davao Oriental State College in Mati.

While the hospital schedule has been firmed up, Jonathan’s family still needs all the help people can share, including fund support.“While we discuss myriad of matters in the warmth of our respective “dap-ays”, let’s lend a hand to this kid out there shivering in the cold,” Makati-based lawyer Harry Paltongan wrote Cordillerans early into Yam?s fight.

Meanwhile, Edwin Abeya, past president of Bimaak, the group of Cordillerans now based in Washington, D.C., greeted Basingat on his birthday with a poem. “Ski for Yam, ski for the needy/So we may share our blessings daily/Remind us every now and then/Of our friends who are downtrodden,” it said in part.

Abeya however wondered and so told the celebrant. “How can you be 52 as Padi says when you were three grades ahead of me in elementary and I’m 57?”Padi seems to be Anglican priest Tony Gomowad. He, too, wired his greetings with a list of humanitarian efforts that Basingat helped steer - educational fund assistance to orphans, scholarships and now the drive for Yam-s medical deliverance. (Ramon Dacawi)