OH WOW. Staying in the hospital for one whole week where I got confined for an infected boil that turned to be a carbuncle that started from an innocent looking pimple on the right side of my tummy made me truly appreciate the beauty of the outdoors. As soon as I stepped out of the hospital gates last Friday evening, I was greeted by dazzling street lights and glittering Christmas blinkers and the city suddenly seemed so bright and alluring to my eyes. Indeed how true it is that you only learn to better appreciate things you would ordinarily take for granted if you are deprived of their pleasure for a significant period of time.
So now I’m back home. Though the wound that resulted from the erupted carbuncle has not completely healed, I begged my doctors to let me go home where I could just continue my medication. I was tired being a prisoner of that hospital bed. I was tired seeing the nurses day and night, as they thoughtlessly marched in my room even in the deep of the night to check if the dextrose was dripping at the right frequency, or to take my temperature reading regardless that I was already fever-free for three days. Oh well, it’s their job, I know. But I only wished they chattered in hushed tones.
Honestly though, I was initially worried about my condition. Even the doctors could not hide their alarm when they saw how morbid the growth had become. There were lesions in the surrounding area and I was having fever. Whenever I would get sick, I always adopted a positive attitude. I would condition my mind into visualizing what I would be doing when I get well and make plans on how I would catch up with work and so on when I fully recover. In other words, I would never give the thought of dying any chance to breed in my mind. But when the dermatologist came, I saw terror on her face. Then she said: “I don’t want to say this yet… but I guess gram culture of the discharges is not enough. I suggest a biopsy.” Then she asked me… or rather grilled me with questions like: “Are you sure that is not a mole?” “Are you sure you did not do anything with it, like scratched or pinched it?” Then my sister started sobbing. Oh my God. I felt like I was already pronounced terminally ill.
That was a really harrowing experience, though on the other side of the coin, it was also a heartwarming one. While in the hospital enduring the needles as my I.V. administration had to be transferred three times because the veins in my hands are very thin and hardly visible, I felt so loved and cared for. My husband never left my side. My kids (two in Manila and one in Baguio) called me now and then to ask how I was doing. Even Liz, my older son’s girlfriend wished me well through text messages. Clearly, they were very much concerned. My brother and sister visited me every day. My nephews and nieces in law were also there to cheer me up. And what touched me most was my mother who was crying all the time, even wishing for my sickness to be transferred to her because according to her she’s old anyway.
Costly medicines. Another eye opener while I was languishing in the hospital was the unbelievable cost of medicines. Since my illness was infectious, I was given massive antibiotic treatment. On my first two days in the hospital, I was given a vial every eight hours. Each vial cost P948.00. I consumed around seven vials. When that medicine did not do much to treat my infection except for the fever, the doctor prescribed another antibiotic injection costing P1,500 per. I had three vials of this medicine. And more to our dismay, my husband and I also realized that it was much cheaper to buy medicines in drugstores outside the hospital where we could have 15 percent savings on costs. Realizing that the P948/vial med was being sold P200 cheaper in other pharmacies, I wonder what word I should use to describe these private hospitals. I can’t think of any other, but GREEDY.
I was aghast. I thought of the families out there who survived on a measly P100 a day food budget. God help them.
It is high time for the Cheap Medicines Bill to become a law. The high cost of medicines is killing the poor people. I just hope though that there would be no politicking or negotiations involved that may hamper the passage of this bill. As we all know, such law will hurt the businesses of multi-million dollar pharmaceutical industries here and abroad. These negotiations probably being forwarded by pharma people to our lawmakers may even result to bribery… if not to totally scrap the bill, to at least get rid of some of the provisions or clauses in the bill that are deemed to badly hurt the gains of profit hungry pharma industrialists.