The Running Man

It was the mid-eighties and GT was trying to make his mark as a medical representative in the rice bowl and fruit and vegetable basket of Northern Mindanao, Bukidnon.

To gain the notice of doctors and pharmacists in the area, GT didn’t allow himself to be influenced by the behavior of his peers.

There were two places where the med reps congregated to promote and sell their company’s products – in the hospitals up the plateau or in the hospitals downhill at the city center.

On the days they met with doctors and did clinical promotions in the shadow of the country’s second highest peak, Mount Dulang-Dulang, GT would hie off by himself to the city center.

And on days when the pack of them would be down at the city center, he would have the plateau all to himself.

He also favored hours when they would be done for the day and off having a beer somewhere, from late afternoon to early evening.

So it was that he found himself on a “coverage” (their term for a publicity run) at a hospital run by nuns about two kilometers uphill from the highway in the municipality of Kibawe on a dark and foggy night.

It must have been close to Christmas because that’s when the roads become so enveloped by mist – one can hardly see two feet ahead even with one’s headlights on high for maximum seeing distance.

He just wrapped up a meeting with a doctor at Phillips Memorial Hospital inside the Del Monte Pineapple Plantation and was rushing to keep an appointment with another at the hospital run by an order of religious sisters, before calling it a day.

At around eight in the evening, he was done with the meeting, dinner, and was trying to catch some sleep at the hospital’s barracks-type sleeping quarters for med reps, but the quiet – broken only by the chirr of crickets and the far-off barking of a dog – was so deafening that all he could manage to do was to toss and turn and kick his blanket off the bed.

After a few more minutes of this futile exercise, he got up and decided to get some air.

Walking down the walkway that connected the sleeping quarters to the hospital, he saw a doctor he knew seated in the shadows, deep in thought.

“Doc, anong ginagawa niyo diyan sa dilim?” he called out.

The doctor stood up and peered at him closely, “Uy, ikaw pala 'yan. Ano, hindi ka makatulog?”

They stood there in the middle of the deserted walkway making polite small talk when the doctor leaned forward and in a conspiratorial whisper said: “Parang alam ko kung bakit hindi ka makatulog.”

His curiosity piqued, GT whispered back: “Bakit, Doc?”

The doctor half-smiled to himself before answering the question: “Alam mo bang morge ng ospital dati yang tinutulugan niyo?” 

GT stopped dead in his tracks thinking of the countless times he felt like he was being watched especially when most of the bunk beds in the room were unoccupied. There were also times when he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end when he was the room’s only occupant, like tonight.

Before he could share these observations with the doctor, however, a nurse came running up to them to say the doctor was needed at the ER. A patient had arrived who was in cardiac arrest and needed his spontaneous blood circulation and breathing restored.

The doctor excused himself and was going to make a run for it, when he almost collided with someone coming down the walkway from the direction of the hospital.

Both the doctor and GT carefully sidestepped to avoid crashing into the man who appeared to be running for the sleeping quarters.

GT thought to himself, "Good, I won’t have to sleep alone after all after that scary story."

But he wouldn’t have felt so relieved if he saw who the doctor failed to revive at the ER.

There on the bed, just formally declared dead and his official time of death recorded, was the same man they almost collided with earlier in the walkway.