1) She had been seeing a professional from UP Manila (maybe as part of the university’s support for all faculty members during the lockdowns) but when F2F started, she fell off the wagon. It’s hard to commute from our town to PGH to see your counselor regularly—schedules and traffic situation are always fucked up. Our common friend told me she was very comfortable with the online setup, just like me.

2) The husband did not pick her up at work. She drove herself as per usual, parked the car not in her usual spot but somewhere it wouldn’t be easily found. When she didn’t come home when it was already dark, that’s when the husband asked friends where she was and then they formed a search party.

3) She might have done it right after a student knocked on her door for a consultation but she told the student to come back on Friday. When they found her in her office, she was already discolored so it might have been more than 5 hours.

4) They didn’t find her immediately because the lights in her office were off so no one would think she was there.

5) There was a note.

6) Some people (police maybe, the people who have read the police report) have spread the story that the spouses had a fight because the husband (a high school classmate of mine) has a third party.

I’m sorry, friend. It’s too much for a mother of a child, who may be under the spectrum, with an iffy husband whom you love to bits. All the pressures of being in the academe. And the support that you had was lost when the world tried to go back to “normal”.

I’m sorry the world is unfair to mothers like us who try to do it all. We can’t. We can’t have it all. Something has got to give.

The world has now less light.

After Twin I’s fever started to dissipate, her diarrhea stepped up so there was no way I could bring her to the clinic. She was in the bathroom every 30 mins. Then she had unbearable stomach aches. Confirmatory Covid antigen test is still negative.

This morning when she woke up she had stomach muscle spasms and then it’s gone. I still had the CBC and fecalysis just to make sure it’s not amoebiasis or I’m missing something. While I believe this is just stomach flu, I really cannot leave things to chance…

Meanwhile, Twin A’s MRI reading shows her insides are responding to the anti-TB meds and it seems like there is no thickening of the colon walls. No more scalloping of the liver. Lymph nodes shrunk, since the old CT showed the biggest was 2.1 cm.