Don’t get sick

From my personal archives. March 21, 2006

From television and the papers, I have long learned that the Philippine health system is on the verge of collapse, but I was only able to see how close it is to the edge when I was hospitalized a few weeks ago.

I suffered from a terrible headache and spent a whole afternoon in bed, writhing and grunting in agony until I threw up everything I ate for lunch. I decided to see a doctor. When my dorm’s landlord saw me very pale and barely able to walk, he offered to go with me and brought me to the nearest hospital—the provincial hospital.

I haven’t been confined in a government hospital before. I got worried about poor facilities and services. But I told myself all I need anyway was just a bottle of IV to rehydrate me, and I could go back to school the next day.

The hospital did not turn out to be as bad as I expected, or at least as compared to the hospital of my home province. But, still, it was not the kind of place that our public officials, especially the legislators, would bring themselves to if they have a health problem. I surmise even the doctors who work in that hospital would not have their sick children treated there. It was a hospital for those who do not have much choice—the penniless and oppressed.

The nurses were either too busy or simply too few. The ones who entertained us were second year nursing students having their hospital exposure.

Being injected with an IV is unpleasant. Being injected by a trembling, first-timer student nurse is dreadful. When the nursing students surrounded me as I sat ready for the needle, I thought they were just going to observe their class instructor inject me. To my horror, the one holding the syringe was a student. Fortunately, she was able to finish her task without any untoward incident, but I was close to crying, “I’m not a guinea pig. Stop it!”

I was made to stay in a room. A note in a small cartolina pasted on the wall read, “Blue Room: Patients need surgery but can wait.” It was crowded by a dozen patients or so, some of them in a catheter and surgical gown. Sickness, poverty and despair abide the place.

When the night came, all the other patients in the Blue Room were transferred to the charity ward. I was told that all the rooms have been occupied and there was no more space in the ward so I have to sleep in the alley. That was when I asked to be transferred to another hospital.

As expected, the private hospital was much better than the provincial hospital. There are a few patients only, and the student nurses did nothing more than check my vital signs and help me change my shirt.

The ultrasound showed I have a liver disease with a tongue-twisting name. I was confined for four days. The bill was bigger than what I pay for a semester at school.

I have to convalesce this summer, and always keep in mind an old lesson that I’ve re-learned: Don’t get sick.