Mission Possible        Carolyn O. Arguillas
 

Journalist-activist Editha Erecre Eco-Eviota passed away gently into the night of March 11, on Bed No. 4 of the Coronary Care Unit of Davao City’s number one private hospital, her home the last 18 days of her life.

Visiting relatives and friends in a hospital isn’t something I cherish, unless the visit is to welcome a newborn or has something to do with journalism but Edith being my best friend among female colleagues, I found myself in the hospital daily, well, mustering the courage each visit, to enter the CCU.
It wasn’t just because she looked real sick with all those tubes and gadgets that made visiting a daily struggle. It was also because there is really something about hospitals in general that makes non-health workers like me want to stay away from them.

Maybe it’s the atmosphere. Maybe it’s the dominance of white. Maybe it’s the smell. Maybe it’s the sight of worried-looking patients and patients’ relatives along the corridors.

If  hospitals can be “baby-friendly,” shouldn’t they also be environment-friendly,  patient-friendly and visitor-friendly?

The last time I was hospitalized (1992 if I recall), I remember feeling more sick staring at  the painting on the wall of the private room —flowers the color of depression — mounted in a rather skewed manner. I hated, too, the fact that I had to have somebody carry the dextrose bottle to the bathroom because there was no dextrose hanger there.

Feeling helpless and skewed paintings don’t do patients any good at all. I cannot blame my friend Edith for having considered her hospital stay a “detention” and for wanting to get out if only to bask in the sun, breathe in fresh air and smell the flowers by the beach. It’s bad enough her hands and feet were tied the first few hours of her  emergency admission (she tried to remove the tubes attached to her mouth and nose), it’s worse to realize you’re likely to die and may not even feel the sunlight anymore because the only window in that room was covered with heavy white drapes.

To a certain degree, hospitals are like detention centers, minus the all-white atmosphere,  grilled windows and barbed wires of perimeter fences. Nurses can sometimes be like prison guards. They may not carry firearms, but sometimes,  they act like prison guards: unfeeling,mechanical, unsmiling.  A cheerful disposition and a smile can make even the most depressed person feel a bit light.

Edith was suffering from thymoma, a rare and usually benign tumor that in her case turned out to be malignant. She went through all possible forms of treatment — cobalt, chemotherapy, linear accelerator and even natural means for about a year — but those pesky cancer cells were simply too invasive. None of us, not even Edith, could have imagined everything could happen so fast. She went to the hospital merely to consult her pulmonologist due to difficulty  in breathing but turned out to be an emergency admission. Her first  written message? “I want to live.”

I think she realized her case was terminal only on March 2, her 10th day of “detention,” when she wrote what would be her only full-length letter (the rest were just notes) expressing her desire to get out of the hospital because the atmosphere was not conducive to healing. I suppose she also meant she didn’t want to die there.

The letter contained her last wish - to get out of the hospital and spend the rest of her remaining days with husband Brady, daughter Pia who’s turning 6 in April and son Baste who’s turning 2 in August. But that simple-sounding wish was impossible to grant because pulling out the tubes would have meant she might not even reach the beach alive.

True, there was another possibility of granting her last wish: move those monitoring and breathing gadgets to a house by the beach. But we didn’t have millions of pesos and hospital bills were mounting each day and the medicines alone cost an average of P10,000 a day (later, that increased to P15,000 a day).

The only other option I could think of was to move her to the Medical Mission Group cooperative hospital in Tagum City, Davao del Norte, the only place I know where visitors’ and yes, patients’ hospital fears fly out of the windows. When I showed friends the calendar of MMG-Tagum which had photographs of the suites in green, pink and beige - the bed facing a window where streams of sunlight are a welcome view and with a  mini garden as bonus - everyone agreed Edith would have loved that. But transferring her to MMG Tagum was ruled out because of her deteriorating state and the distance — at least 60 kilometers away.

There were also efforts to move her to a government hospital because financial resources were draining by the day but there were no available ventilators (there are more ventilators in the government hospital but there are many more patients needing those ventilators).  When a ventilator was finally made available on March 9, Edith couldn’t be moved anymore. Her condition had gone downhill.

Two days later, she was dead, her last wish unfulfilled.

Now try being in an all-white atmosphere for 18 days, unable to talk because of the tube in your mouth, unaware that the sun had risen or set (unless you asked through notes or sign language whether it’s daytime or nighttime).

Try enjoying the sight of lovely fresh flowers only to be depressed minutes later when the nurses asked the flower-bearers to bring them out because they are a possible cause of  infection. Artificial flowers are okay, one of the nurses said, but when friends brought some real-looking flowers complete with real-looking dewdrops, they were again told to bring them out. We ended up pasting colorful posters of the sea, sunrise, rainbow, flowers, mounted them on a manila paper and posted it on the wall beside her bed (only beds number 1 and 4 were by the wall), along with her daughter’s letter and drawings. Even that met objections from the nursing staff. “The nurses  are not pleased with what you’ve done,” Edith wrote.

But the crude work of art remained on the wall until she died because her doctors did not object. We were not able to grant Edith her last wish. I am not angry over that. I know it was impossible.

Just as I know many others may have made the same wish on their deathbed inside a hospital. I could only wish that serious thought be given by hospital owners in making  hospitals as friendly as they are to babies. (We’re not even discussing here how to make hospitals friendly as well to those with meager financial resources).

Way before and long after hospitals required newborns to be roomed in with their mothers, nunseries had always been the best place in any hospital. As a place for the beginnings of a new life, hospital nurseries are always the brightest, prettiest rooms with all those cheerful decorations their temporary occupants can’t even appreciate.

But hospitals are not just for birthings; they are also for healing. And yes, dying. Cannot the atmosphere for beginnings be as conducive for endings?*
 

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