A colleague’s daughter suffered a three-hour seizure episode and had a hard time getting admitted to any ER because every hospital in the metro is full of Covid cases. She is intubated and on life support now, in the FEU parking lot because there really is no space for her. She is around 7 years old or younger.

The cost now of hospitalization is very high as he posted on FB:

Right now, she’s confined in one of the tents in FEU. Because of COVID safety protocols, the bill can reach PHP 50k (USD 1k) per day because PHP 4k per PPE plus PHP 5k per swab of each doctor and nurse watching over her on rotation. I don’t know yet how much the intubation, bloodwork, x-ray and other tests would cost. I no longer have the strength to ask. As long as G’s condition stabilizes, that’s all I want to hear. But we may still be far from that.

I contacted his boss (this colleague isthe Philippine correspondent of a sister publication so he’s not under me) to inform him of what’s going on and to ask if something can be done to help ease his financial burden, like a salary advance or loan from our mother company or maybe the company employees pass the hat. This afternoon my colleague showed me his running bill for 24 hrs and it’s already more than PHP 100k. He told me that apparently his daughter has been having seizures for 24 hrs but they just didn’t know because those were just ticks and they were sleeping so they weren’t aware. Because of that, her brain may have been deprived of oxygen.

The child’s mother (also a friend) posted on FB that the doctor said she may already be brain dead; she hasn’t woken up yet.

I have asked our journo organization here to extend financial help to ease his worries. The current president is a good friend of mine and he said he will raise it to the board.

I know how it is when your child/children are on life support, fighting to see another day. I didn’t have the strength to cry at that time whenever I saw my twins full of tubes, watching their monitors, hoping that I won’t see a flat line. I held up and didn’t allow myself to be weak because once I start crying, I will crumble and never function anymore. I never rested; the day I got released from my hospital confinement after my Caesarian section, I traveled to my twins’ hospital everyday. CS mothers are usually given enough time to rest; I didn’t allow myself to rest. I needed to be with my babies everyday and express breast milk because they needed to be fed via gavage tubes since they were too premature to suck on their own.

I couldn’t think about hospital expenses at that point; my thoughts were on my children’s survival. I saved money to prepare for my children’s birth but I didn’t expect that they would be spending 31 days in the NICU. It’s hard to think about bills when you don’t know whether the doctor will just suddenly come to you and say your child/children have flatlined and are never coming back.

You cling to hope. To hell with hospital bills.

So I’m doing everything in my power to help this colleague.

As part of this reflection about life and death, I started writing ahain on my old-school journal so I can finally close this 2021 chapter. I needed to fill up the gaps from the moment I stopped writing in July to my Covid episode, to my reflections of 2021. So I can leave it all behind.

Why do I bother doing it? So that my children can have something tangible to hold on to when I die. My memories will live with them. Twin I declared, no Mommy, you are immortal. You will live forever.

Yes darling, I said in my head, I will live on these pages, and on my blog.