“The Pitt,” the critically acclaimed HBO medical series which just wrapped up its second season, has been a hit with one particular community in North America: Filipinos.

Finally, a popular drama that highlights the roles of Filipinos in a hospital, from the nurses played by Kristin Villanueva (Princess) and Amielynn Abellara (Perlah) to the resident physician played by the brilliant Isa Briones (Dr. Santos), who even sang a Filipino lullaby in a memorable scene.

The series has resonated with me personally. I have close friends and relatives who are nurses. My wife is a nurse. So was my late mother. 

In fact, the image of the mother as a nurse has always been part of my world.

Its power became clear to me when my son made a choice during a brief visit to the hospital many years ago. I expected he would pick me. Instead, he picked his mother.

He’d just had a minor procedure and the doctor said the surgery room could only accommodate one parent at a time. The doctor had asked our son who he would like to come first.

He was around seven at that time and we had been spending more time together. So I really expected that he would ask for me.

Nope. He wanted mom.

My wife and I both took care of our children when they were growing up. We both took time off from work to focus full time on raising them when they were infants. But when it came to not feeling well or other health matters, our sons were just naturally inclined to turn to Mom.

Perhaps my boys were simply making the smart, rational choice: For aches and pains, why go to the journalist — go to the nurse practitioner.

I would have made the same choice.

A nurse in San Lazaro

My late mother worked as a nurse for more than 25 years. She spent her whole career at San Lazaro Hospital in Manila, a health care institution founded in 1577 to battle infectious diseases in the country.

She was committed to her work. One night in the 1980s, we were driving home when we came across an accident where someone got hurt. Some of the men on the street were looking for someone to give the poor man a ride to the hospital.

“Let’s take him,” my mother said.

We didn’t have to, it turned out. A Good Samaritan had stepped in to take the injured man.

Even after she retired, my mother’s nursing instincts remained strong. When my father was ill during the last few months of his life, my family hired two male nurses to care for him.

During one evening transition, when Brian, the day shift nurse, was handing off the work to Ren, the night-shift nurse, my mother momentarily forgot about her retirement. When I told her that it was time for the night nurse to take over, she grew impatient: “Wait. I still have to endorse the patient.”

My father spent his final days being cared for by my mother. It marked a return to the way they were. That was how they met.

It was after the war and he was recuperating in Manila from the maladies that came to plague him after spending years in the jungle as a guerrilla during World War II. My mother was his nurse.

One of my most cherished memories of her final years and the final days of my father was when I came home to help care for him. We were not immediately able to get a night-shift caregiver. So I had to fill in for a night which meant sleeping on a mattress on the floor of my parents’ room.

The plan was for me to attend to my father’s needs so that my mother could sleep. But that’s not how it worked out, not with a retired nurse also in the room.

Sometime in the middle of that night, I heard movement. At first, I thought it was my father, but he was sound asleep. It was, in fact, my mother who was on the move. She was on her feet, taking one small step at a time — toward me.

She was carrying a blanket. It was for me.

She had guessed, correctly, that I was getting cold in their air-conditioned room.

She couldn’t help it. My mother, the lifelong nurse, just had to do something. – Rappler.com

(First published in the author’s LinkedIn.)

Benjamin Pimentel is a journalist and technology editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His novel, Mga Gerilya Sa Powell Street, won the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction and was staged by the CCP’s Tanghalang Pilipino in 2008.