THERE are 13 booths, one each for the 13 towns of Benguet at the on-going “adivay” festival of Benguet at the provincial athletic bowl.
The adivay spirit of celebrating Benguet hospitality, however, is found at the 14th booth. It’s manned alternately by each of the municipalities. Engr. Edmund Bugnosen and I were there last Tuesday when it was managed by folks from Itogon town. They offered free coffee, camote, gabi and boiled banana, thereby giving flesh to adivay. We got their names: Rosito Bay-eng, Mildred Fianza, Ma. Asuncion Dupingay, Nancy Ramos, Asteria Serape, Paz Chalipo, Felicitas Pida, Norma Amos, Donald Afidchao, Prudencio Pedro, Marlon Daliling, Grace Tinda-an and Jamie Lumbag.
Having survived the past three years on a dialysis machine for a kidney, my life has become complicated, sometimes difficult, thanks to the debilitating effects of having too much sugar without a hacienda.
Sooner or later, I will have to equip myself with a magnifying glass to help me read clearly my medications. Why can’t pharmaceutical companies be more patient-friendly by labeling their medicines for the ageing - in my case maintenance doses for the heart and complications of diabetes - with bigger fonts readable by senior citizens who compose the majority of their product users?
Time and again, and despite my fear of the charges, I would be confined , in hospitals whose personnel, including nurses who are supposed to make you feel alright or better, one after the other keep reminding you to make a deposit. Why can’t they check first if you already made a deposit before they blurt out the same advice. It would do well for these institutions to limit themselves to issuing, without miss and on a daily basis, your mounting bill without your nurse reminding you of the same. As it is, the practice is unhealthy, for the patient tends to cringe and becomes prone to a heart attack each time a nurse comes in to remind him of his mounting financial obligation.
Full disclosure of what you owe the hospital so far may be honest, but I bristled when a hospital included in its unbundled rates an item for “Use of scissors – P20”. It would do well for them to hide the charged item by using another service fee, not “use of scissors”.
Coming out of the recovery room after a stent was inserted in a vein in my heart, an attendant made me sit on a wheelchair he pushed towards my room, which was fronting the recovery room. “Sir, may bayad ito, sir, three hundred pesos,” he advised. Peeved, I asked, “Pupunta ba sa ‘yo yong bayad?” He answered “no”, to which I replied, “Kung para sa inyo yong wheeling fee, dodoblihin ko sana.”
Some hospitals need to take to task their dieticians for basic lack of care or incompetence. In all the times I was confined in a local hospital, my first meal included a potassium-rich banana Potassium is a no-no for kidney patients, with serious consequences for those who do not know and go bananas over bananas. The point is that because the hospital served bananas for breakfast, a dialysis patient may consider it harmless or healthy to gobble up several, as bananas are normally brought in by visitors equally unaware of the fruit’s dire effect on those undergoing dialysis. Failed kidneys can no longer remove excess potassium, which results in hyperkalemia. Its effect include nausea, weakness, numbness and slow pulse.
For their own practical purposes, nurses in a hospital give patients their medicine doses for the morning, noon and afternoon at one time, saving them added effort and leaving the patient to remember which pill is for when. Often, I get confused on which pill to take as dementia now and then sets in.
That’s why I mourn the closure of the school of nursing of the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center. It was one of the best nursing schools in the country that produced top-notchers, aside from ready support manpower for patient care.
When I headed the BGHMC Dialysis Patients Association, we were discouraged from posting notices of the group on the hospital bulletin board fronting the dialysis center. I was told it had something to do with keeping the ISO standards of the facility. Months later, I was given a comment form into which I wrote that patients should be given a voice through the bulletin board. That’s when I was told that our association can actually paste notices provided these are first approved by the administration. So we followed the procedure that should have been told us earlier. (email: mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments).