Pulangbato diaries: The Adventure Continues

It was our second week in Pulangbato. Before we went there, I already planned our meal for the whole week. When we arrived in San Juan we went to the public market to buy the ingredients for our planned meals. The list included pinakbet, sinigang, adobo, etc. Our shopping bags also included native dried fish which we planned to served our table for breakfast.

Chat with the policemen at the market

Back to Pulangbato which we aliased Redrock (which accentuated the adventures we had in the barangay), we played basketball with the young men of the community. That was really tiring but fulfilling for my part for it was my first time to play real ball outside my home. Our team of three who donated the new ball to the community lost to the team of the young men from the community. Sweating out fat was a reward. Talking to them and to Kuya Pauli, our foster brother, sports was not really a priority in the community and not even a complete court was constructed by ‘husto sa salitang’ politicians. After playing basketball, our feet got really powdered with sand dust and one had to estimate the ring to nail the big shot. We went home to prepare dinner and ate heartily.

RJ & Don playing with the men of the community

The following day, our team joined Ate Shiela, our midwife, in the clinic in Brgy. Quipot. We assisted her in the immunization of the babies. We also attended to some of OPD cases, both pediatric and geriatric. One patient asked us why there were no interns assigned in the barangay and ate Shiela explained that the barangay captain’s thrust was not for a Community Based Health Program. Of the 42 barangays of San Juan, lucky were the 12 barangays assigned with medical interns. There were still a lot of barangays who probably need the guidance of medical professionals. Hopefully before the end of the 5 year projection of the CBHP almost all of the barangays would be having community doctors and not merely relying to clinics in nearby communities and bigger health facilities.

Administering vaccines

Third day was our barangay’s clinic day. We arrived at the health center with a lot of mothers and children waiting for the Expanded Program of Immunization and consultation. Ate Shiela and the 12 barangay health workers were there. We had 10 consults during our clinic hours. Inside a small room, each one of us interns grabbed a place to attend to our patients. Most of our consults were Upper Respiratory Tract Infection – similar to medical mission consults which I have had handled in my organization. I even prescribed one patient with a mucolytic to Viral URTI for the purpose of satisfying the parent and not living an impression that her doctor did not prescribe her medications and just advised increased oral fluid intake. We could see that still a lot of people were not knowledgeable of some diseases and someone need to explain to them that not all diseases need drugs for treatment. So our goal is to educate the people – starting from the Barangay Health Workers who will be our partners in health education.

During Thursday night, we were convincing Jev, our foster kid to undergo circumcision. As we woke up Friday morning, eating our sumptuous meal of tinapa and corned beef, Jev had already taken a bath and got ready for his big day. We brought him to the Rural Health Unit in town were RJ and I voluntarily performed the minor surgery. Kuya Pauli, nanay Pinay and Jev’s cousins were really happy and even teasing him. Kuya Pauli was glad that there were Kuya’s to accompany Jev whose father died when he was still very young.

Tuli mission

Late in the afternoon, after our siesta, we saw nanay repeatedly vomiting outside our home. We checked her BP – spiking to 200 systolic. Nanay was feeling weak already. We suspected food poisoning because she’s the only one who ate the ginataang tulingan which was not refrigerated for 2 days. We first gave nanay a trial of captopril and rehydrate her but she again vomited so we decided to bring her to the district hospital. It was my first time to enter that hospital. In the emergency room, a nurse attended to nanay, got her vital signs and called the doctor in his callroom. Nanay was lined with plain NSS (which in my opinion is inappropriate to a vomiting hypertensive patient – well I cannot contest the order of the attending physician for I was not working in that hospital). Nanay was admitted in the ward and as the nurse was instructing Ate Lagrimas, it seemed like that nanay was being treated only as a hypertensive patient and the suspected food poisoning was neglected. The nurse did not even instructed Ate Lagrimas that the nifedipine was supposed to be punctured and put sublingually. That moment was really depressing and nothing I could do to change what was happening.