A Life That Matters

The next two years, I could feel my health deteriorating fast. All that time, I was angrier with God because I believed that what happened to me was His devious plan to quell my budding rebellion. I moped and brooded because I really could not do anything about it. Finally, my cardiologist decided to do an angiogram on my heart, a procedure where they insert a catheter through a major blood vessel and take a peek at the arteries in the heart. The verdict was conclusive: I had blockages of 100%, 80%, and 70% on three major arteries in my heart. About a quarter of my heart was permanently damaged by the heart attack two years earlier. I was four weeks away from a major heart attack that could be fatal. I needed a heart bypass surgery quickly.

In my panic, I accelerated all the preparations for a heart bypass surgery. Taking the word of a local cardiologist in Jakarta that his surgeon friend in Perth, Australia, could perform the surgery at a moment’s notice, my wife and I flew to Perth in a hurry, leaving our three children under the care of some friends. The thoracic surgeon was Mark Edwards. He was livid when we told him about his cardiologist friend’s words. He said he was fully booked four weeks in advance. He advised me to come back after four weeks. Thinking that I was being condemned to death by default, I pleaded with him to place me in his proximate schedule.

I must have looked so desperate as he looked at me with his sad–looking eyes. He heaved a sigh and announced that he was scheduling me for surgery that Saturday, even before he had a chance to tell his wife and kids about the weekend he would not be with them and even before he could call together his weekend surgical team. I did not know him from Adam, but this man decided in a couple of seconds what I would owe him for the rest of my life.

There was another man in that consultation room. His name was Paul Sarmidi. He was the person my boss in Jakarta contacted to make the arrangements for my surgery in Perth. He was a small dealer of canned goods that our company was using as distributor of our food products for Perth, a secondary city located in West Australia with a population of one million. He had made the consultation arrangement with Mark Edwards. Paul Sarmidi was a radiologist during his prime years as a doctor in Jakarta, Indonesia; he was spending his years of retirement in Perth, West Australia. Chinese in ethnic origin, he was born and raised in Jakarta. He was what people generally called Chinese Indonesian.

Mark Edwards carried out a successful double-bypass heart surgery on me some fourteen years ago. Among the four patients from Indonesia that he successfully operated on at about the same week, I am the only one still alive today. Two died within a year after their surgeries, while the third one died within the third year after his surgery.

I stayed in Perth a total of two months for that surgery. I overstayed in Perth for a month because my official travel documents were stolen from the apartment hotel’s safe, and it took some time for the Philippine Embassy in Canberra, Australia to replace my documents.

Paul Sarmidi visited me every day I was there during those two months. All that my boss in Jakarta wanted from him was to make the initial arrangements for me. I also did not know him from Adam. He did not have to do what he did for me, but there was a genuine gentleness about Paul that I could not really fathom.

Slowly, I realized what was happening. What Mark and Paul did for me was more than just bring me back from the jaws of death; they gave me new eyes. I had always thought of myself as an exceptional man who was always ready to be the man God could count on to deliver for those who needed some help, and I begrudged Him for always putting me on the spot. When Mark and Paul delivered for me at the hour of my need, I was humbled by the message God seemed to be delivering.

It was as if He was telling me that all those talents that I considered to be mine were really His gifts to me, that all those opportunities to help were also His gifts to me, that I was one of the few He would call on because there were not many of us who could do those things for Him. By revealing to me two of his angels at the time of my need, he made me realize that I was not alone in carrying out the things He wanted done. There were other people like me, and I was in the company of great people who silently make the world a better place. Things did not look the same again afterwards. Forwards and backwards, I had a completely different view of things.