True "Filipino Horror Story"

You might want to read this first :) Filipino Horror Story

What drew me to this article a long time ago was the title. Back when I was in sixth grade, there was this mini-horror book series that almost everyone read and even though I wasn’t a fan of horror books, I remember reading a few and okay fine having one or two nightmares after. Relevance now. I found this piece while browsing through the online Young Blood editorial column of The Philippine Daily Inquirer last year. I been read a lot of Young Blood editorials when I was in grade school and I don't quiet remember having encountered horror stories then so when I saw the title of the article, I was intrigued and immediately read through the piece…

There are at least two things I want to share with regards to this piece. Let’s start with the obvious, what is explicitly being said by the author: what is IN the picture.

Well… the piece is a story about a family’s struggle, particularly a mother’s struggle, to save her son who is dying from tuberculosis and pneumonia. It is a story of a family resorting to alternative measures, such as “hilot” (in Filipino, an art of healing that either involves relaxing of muscles, like massage, or shamanic spiritual rituals) and borrowing money from the loan shark due to lack of money to get him proper healthcare. It is a story of neglect, as the nurses turned them down telling them “the quota of 60 patients per day has been filled.” It is a story of poverty; about a fight for survival, and a battle for a life that was unnecessarily lost in the end to infections that could have been cured had it been treated early.

However, as much as this piece is a story of poverty and the battles of the poor for healthcare support, it is also a story of the middle class (perhaps the rich too), particularly those involved in the healthcare system. Which brings me to the second point I want to share. That is, what the author is implicitly saying: what is NOT in the picture. For it is indeed true, sometimes what is missing tells us just as much as what is present. 

In this case, what is NOT in the picture is government. Yet the consequences of their absence are written throughout the article. Not just through the struggles of the poor, but through the struggles of those involved in healthcare system as well. Needless to say, this particular piece is then also a story about the efforts of those working in the healthcare system. It is the story of nurses, doctors, and health social workers who are unable to fully execute their responsibilities because of lack of healthcare funding, to the extent that they sometimes secretly raise funds or use money from their own pockets to aid their patients. But these are middle class (sometimes lower middle class) workers too (or at least most of them from what I know), they are not paid enough, they do not even have any worker benefits, and they have their own family to take care of.

Such are (some of) the problems in the healthcare system in the Philippines. And indeed, perhaps, for some this article may be a little too melodramatic---romanticized (if I may use Professor Roy’s term)---but the thing about romanticizing is that it also speaks truth. And in this case, the truth is that this is reality for most people in the Philippines; the true Filipino horror story.