If you were reading with me a couple days ago you will recall that we finally got Momma safely back to her home in the wee hours of December 26th.

The obstruction was thankfully gone, but the hassle of staying up all night and ‘slepping’ from hospital to hospital had taken it’s toll.  I know how tired I felt, i can only imagine how tired Momma was.

I went home and went to bed myself, got up about 10 am, moped around a bit and at 2 pm we got a call … Momma’s blood pressure was down and she wasn’t looking good.

So, off we went to good old Nazarenus Hospital where the odyssey had started the night before.  At the ER they weren’t happy with momma’s vitals either and called her primary care physician.  His answer was curt.  "Admit her, I’m on my way over."

Because he’s treated mom for many years, her doctor knows every7 detail of her history.  He did a few tests and as he had suspected, Momma was in the early stages of some sort of infection … likely brought on by the throat trauma and by the stress of here all night odyssey.  The doc didn’t feel oral meds or injections would be enough, so he wanted Momma into a private room right away where they started an IV anti-biotic regimen.

She didn’t do all that well the first night, blood pressure was yoyoing and her sugar wouldn’t go down, even with insulin (Momma’s’ had Diabetes for years).  My brother and sister-in-law stayed with Momma that night (in the Philippines they think the American policy of keeping family members away from their sick loved ones is pretty strange) and they didn’t get much sleep because the nurses were in every 20 minutes or so, checking and rechecking.

But praise the Lord, by Thursday am she was fine, out of bed and watching TV and anxious for the doctor to come by and release her.

he came, and was pleased, but nothing doing on the release that afternoon, we had to wait until Friday afternoon to get her home. all healthy and happy again … and boy were we happy too.

The care Momma got she could have gotten anywhere, but based on the painful experience of watching both my parents fade away from "old folks" diseases in the US and the absolutely uncaring care they got, I’m really glad for the doctors, nurses and hospitals I’ve dealt with since I’ve been here in the Philippines.

What did all this cost, you might ask?  Good question, since I detailed the costs in part one.  For three nights in a private room, a number of intravenous treatments, doctors visits twice a day, meals, etc, the grand total came up to PhP 16060 (at today’s rate, Right at $392 USD.  Since Daddy has free PhilHealth because he’s retired, they will submit the bill to PhilHealth for reimbursement … about 4,000 to 5,000 pesos will come back to them from PhilHealth.  Not a huge amount, but over $100 USD at least, and you can’t find that sort of money lying in the street.

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