A trip to the hospital

January 12,  2010

Yesterday, I went for an early bike ride. When I came home, Emelie and I got ready to scooter down to Besa’s carenderia for breakfast. Before we left, Emelie’s sister Jane, Jane’s daughter Stephanie, and grand daughter Shane pulled up in front of the house in a tricycle-taxi.

Shane had been sick for the past few days, with vomiting and diarrhea. The three of them were on their way to the hospital in Malabuyoc, 8 kilometers north of us. After they left, Emelie and I went to the shop to take care of some business. Then we headed for the hospital but stopped in a carenderia in Malabuyoc for breakfast first.

Our three relatives were sitting on a cot in the hallway, in front of the nurses’ station, when we entered the hospital. Shane already had an I.V. port in her hand. A bottle of sugar water, hanging from a pole, fed the vein where the needle entered her hand. The three of them were waiting for the doctor and an empty hospital bed so Shane could be admitted.

The human body is a living skin-sack of watery fluids. When the water leaks out faster than it is being replaced – as with the double-whammy of diarrhea and vomiting – all sorts of things go awry, and in short order, the person who is dehydrating can be on the dividing line between life and death. And Shane was especially vulnerable, having lost two and a half pounds of her meager body weight of 13.5 pounds, in the last two days. At 11 pounds, she was less than half the normal weight of a girl her age.

The hospital was full of children. Every one of them had an I.V. going. There were a dozen boxes of liquid Ampicillin, for injection, sitting on the counter at the nurses’ station. After the doctor examined Shane, I asked him why the hospital was full of children and why they all had I.V.s. He said they were all suffering from diarrhea and vomiting, caused by the bacteria Salmonella typhi and contracted through contamination with human feces. It was Typhoid fever! In Alegria, the next town north, the public water supply was contaminated and the hospital was overflowing with infected children. The contamination came on the heels of flooding from very heavy rains a week ago. The flooding waters must have come in contact with human feces and then entered the public water supply.

In our town, Ginatilan, the water was heavily chlorinated after the rains. But it wasn’t enough. Over the course of the next couple of days, we would discover that Emelie’s God-son, another niece and a nephew were all at the Malabuyoc hospital being treated for the same symptoms. All came from Ginatilan. A compounding factor, in the spread of contagious disease, is the eating habits of many Filipinos. Fingers were made before forks, and many families use them, in lieu of forks, knives and spoons, to eat their meals. In combination with inadequate or non-existent hand-washing and sharing food from a common bowl, infectious agents are also shared and disease is spread throughout the family.

Shane was admitted. She would sleep a while, wake up, nurse or drink water, then lay and stare, wide-eyed. Her heart was beating fast. She cried sometimes, but it was a weak and tearless cry. I was afraid for her. She was so small and skinny and very, very sick. The doctor started her on Ampicillin, vitamins and something for her fever and cough.

We were sitting in the pediatric ward of the hospital. Jane, Stephanie and Shane were on the bed. In the hall outside the doorway to the ward, there was a group of people sitting before a candle-lit altar, singing religious songs - slow and sad, but beautiful - in Cebuano. A big man with a guitar accompanied them.

I looked around the room we were in. A sleepy ceiling fan twirled. Light coming through the jalousie windows filtered through green curtains, giving a sickly caste to life in the ward and accentuating the cold loneliness of the melancholy music.

Emelie, Jane and Stephanie were all singing. The baby slept peacefully on Grandma Jane’s lap. The other four families in the ward – women and their young daughters – were quiet. Maybe they were listening. Maybe they were keeping company with their private thoughts. Everyone looked far away, but intense in their self-absorption, as if performing a silent soliloquy. It was like a Tennessee Williams play: subtly surreal.

 The music was everything. In contrast to the wistful tune, there was a palpable message of hope, or maybe a longing for hope, in the strong and clear voices of the believers. It filled the silent crevices of unspoken fears - about sickness, about poverty, hunger and the future.