Marge in the City…

So it’s Sunday, and we’re back in the City… the Medical City, that is.

After a few days of her stereophonic coughing and a few drops of antibiotics, Marge’s increasingly labored breathing rate dictated that we bring her to the emergency room right away… so we did.

As I write this, Marge has received a drip of meds, an oxygen mask (which she hates), an oxygen gauge attached to her big toe (which glows a funky red…), and we’re camped in a room without a fridge.

Supposedly out of danger, but this is still a hospital, and we’re checked in…

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For what it’s worth, I must commend the Medical City for having a separate pediatric section in their ER, and for having a very clean, calming and not too oppressive ER in general. Of course, the wifey just credits this to the hospital’s newness. But it was a total contrast to the smelly marketplace that was the Makati Med ER, the slightly better but obviously old and very eventful St. Luke’s ER, and the quite efficient, but obviously old and under-budgeted Capitol ER, where I screamed like a bitch while a resident jammed a needle into different places of my ripped palm…

Another bonus was me finding that the wifey and Marge were already being attended to when I got back up in the ER after parking the van.

The only thing that bothered me about the pediatric section was how fucking upbeat, sometimes cheerful and plain pleasant the staff was.

It was quite disconcerting. I was sweating like a pig on a treadmill, and asked the physician who attended to us and who received the instructions of Marge’s doctor, Dr. Delfin Santos, whether she seemed upbeat because Marge wasn’t in any real danger. She candidly and quite oddly replied that they are trained to act as though they are instinctively countering any potential panic situation. An answer of course, that somehow implies that I have something to panic about…

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It’s funny how one has to be really good reading between the lines and forced pleasantries of medical professionals to patiently dig through to the truth sometimes. But I simply credit this to the fact that medical staff are still people. And as people, they don’t like delivering bad news. You have to pry their mouths open with some psychic crowbar.

Hopefully, no false pleasantries here, and no need for crowbars…