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"I have never been hospitalized," Dureza said in a phone interview.
According to Dureza, the intense stomach aches he suffered came an hour after he had a slice of pizza and ginger ale in a New York pizza joint last Thursday (Friday morning in Manila).
He said he had gone to the Fifth Avenue restaurant for a late lunch after accompanying President Arroyo to her bilateral meetings with world leaders.
"I returned to my hotel room and called up my sister who is a doctor from Davao," he recalled when he said the antacids he took did not help ease the pain.
After describing to her his symptoms, Dr. Marjorie Dureza-Culas told her brother to go to the hospital as he might even be having a heart attack.
"It was a continuous numbing pain that seemed to be radiating all over my body," was how Dureza described the pain he had then.
After trying to call 911, the emergency number there, he said he decided to just go to the hospital after his sister told him that a cousin of her husband was working there.
But when he got to the hospital, the emergency room was filled up with patients that included a pregnant woman.
With the pain unbearable by now, Dureza said he saw a Filipino nurse and then went up to him and said: "I am a Filipino and I think I had a heart attack."
He said the nurse then helped him. The cousin of his brother-in-law had just arrived in the hospital.
Dureza said doctors ran several tests to check suspicions he had a heart attack or an aneurysm.
It took the doctors one more day to determine that it was food poisoning.
Before the diagnosis, Dureza said he was given morphine for the pain and that he had a fever.
But all throughout his ordeal, Dureza said he was not worried because he had just months ago undergone an executive check up in preparation for his new job as press secretary and was given a clean bill of health by his doctors.
Dureza said during his hospital stay, he talked twice to President Arroyo, who last called him on Saturday.
The President, he said, couldn’t help but find it funny that his troubles came from a slice of pizza.
"Natatawa sya (She was laughing)," he said of President Macapagal-Arroyo, who had been hospitalized previously with acute diarrhea as well as a spell of fever and colds.
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