City of children

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First of two parts

This is a story of young boys and girls. It begins in a room with a pastel green door, and walls with hot air balloons, flowers and robots and a crawling pink crab.

Angel, 13, steps inside the smaller room with a yellow door. It is Friday, a school day, but this is not a classroom where children learn math or science or the Chocolate Hills and the three main islands of the Philippines.

A woman in a crisp white laboratory coat waits for Angel, ready with a syringe. Angel has been in this same room the week before this, and the week before that and many other weeks since September last year.

Today, she is wearing a purple floral sleeveless top so she doesn’t have to roll up the sleeves. She stands and takes the shot; she doesn’t cringe or cower. By now, she is used to the jab on her right arm. When she is done, she goes back to her seat, in a row of red plastic chairs in the waiting room with the pastel green door. She opens her borrowed tablet covered with dusty violet leatherette and attempts to prevent an army of zombies from eating the brains of her plants. It is her favorite game. She will wait for another doctor to call her name. There will be another procedure to check her blood.

Angel has leukemia, diagnosed in September last year. It was an ordinary night with fever, says her father. But it was no ordinary fever, the thermometer stayed at 40 degrees Celsius. She is bald now. The thick black hair that once cascaded down her shoulders is gone because of chemotherapy.

Welcome to the Cancer and Hematology Center of the government-owned Philippine Children’s Medical Center (PCMC) in Quezon City, a decrepit building with faded walls of red, blue and yellow, built decades ago with the help of Elizabeth Taylor.

Angel is one of roughly 100 cancer patients seeking treatment here daily.

“Every day, there are 200 to 300 outpatients that come here, of whom 100 are cancer patients,” says Jara Corazon Ejera, deputy director of PCMC.

Angel’s father Armando is a tricycle driver, but he has stopped driving to take care of his daughter. If he could, he would still ply the roads of Bulacan but he needs to bring Angel to the hospital almost every week or more often than that.

They live in a borrowed room, in far-away Bulacan, in the northern part of the country, two hours away from PCMC.

In the mornings, they leave the house before the roosters wake up because the queue can be long. Armando says he and his wife choose to bring Angel here because the cost of treatment is half that of a private hospital. And the doctors are good and kind, he says.

“It’s P75 here. Outside, it’s P300 to P500,” says Armando, referring to the consultation fee for patients. Angel’s Cytarabine infusion, a chemotherapy agent, costs P200 at PCMC. It can cost P1,000 in a private hospital.

Miriam, mother to 11-year-old Johnell, also leaves their home in Caloocan at 5 in the morning to beat the long lines. But for Johnell’s chemotherapy, there is no other choice except the PCMC.

“I asked around in my neighborhood. They told me PCMC is good. And it is. I’ve seen the doctors here. They are really good,” she says.

Miriam used to work in Dubai as a domestic helper but she had to come home when she learned of Johnell’s leukemia.

Parents like Miriam and Armando usually have to stop working so they can take care of their children full-time. The children have to stop schooling until they get better.

There’s no fixed schedule for treatments. Sometimes, their children turn pale in the dead of night, in the stillest of hours, in the most quiet of moments, in between dreams and nightmares. When that happens, they rush to the hospital. Costs keep spiraling because leukemia patients are too fragile for public transportation. It is too dirty. It is too tiring.

“We have no choice but to pay for a cab,” says Armando.

During treatment at PCMC, their children go through several procedures, which can sometimes take the whole day. To save on costs, they bring lunch and snacks. Whatever money left is used to pay for the treatment and medicine.

Miriam says she cannot afford to bring Johnell to a private hospital because the costs are higher.

More than that, she says, she is at ease at PCMC because the doctors are kind to her son.

“They know what they’re doing,” she says.

The doctors are warm and gentle, all smiles in white laboratory coats. They know the children by their names: Angel, Shyli, Johnell, John, Faye, Catherine.

This story, originally published in the authors’ collaborative website www.roadtopuka.com , hopes to shed light on PCMC’s campaign to be able to permanently retain its present site.