Day 05 - Of Bad, Bad Doctors and The Pope Wearing Prada

What a way to conclude my first internship week.

But before we proceed, may I just express sadness over the fact that yesterday's shift will most probably me my last internship shift with Claire, because just this morning she went on a FREAKING WESTERN EUROPEAN TOUR and she won't be coming back until two weeks or so.  By the time she returns, I'd have already finished working my internship hours.  So yeah, basically, it's a bummer that my partner-in-internship-crime won't be here anymore, and what sucks even more is that it's all because she'll be touring one of the parts of the world I've been dreaming to visit one of these days.  Wuh.  Anyway, enough with the bitterness, let's proceed to the kwento, okay?

Before heading to the Kamuning Police Station 10 in the morning, I dropped by MassComm first to fetch a few documents I needed for the internship.  Apparently, both Claire and I were too lax about our internship that we forgot about certain documents we had to submit.  After MassComm, which was eerily quiet that day, I rode a bus at Central on my way to Kamuning.

Unfortunately, when we reached East Avenue, traffic was really bad.  Claire called and asked where I was, and we found out we were about meters apart from each other, stuck in traffic.  By the time we got to EDSA things got even worse, so when the bus was a stone's throw away from the station, I just decided to walk the remaining distance to the station.

When I arrived, Claire was already there and we proceeded to the Press Office, where we saw Sir Marlon.  Apparently the blotter wasn't available for viewing at that time, because the policemen are doing something with it.  I didn't know, and we didn't bother to ask.  So we decided to proceed to Camp Karingal instead.

Camp Karingal is a quaint, little police camp tucked in the middle of a not-so-posh village in Quezon City.  One would be surprised this strange little place actually housed a camp with real policemen, real guns, real criminals inside their prisons.  When I first got here I was surprised--because there were residents (considered illegal settlers by the camp) at the back portion of the camp, so anybody could go in and out of the camp without being suspected of anything.  Back then I thought police camps are exclusive to policemen and their ranks.  Camp Karingal was different.

We proceeded to our usual stop, CIDU, and browsed the blotter.  There was a report about two motorists being gunned down along Litex Road; then there was the shocker of the day--a 13-year-old boy killing another 13-year-old, no less than his friend.

When we found the report, we--all four of us--were abuzz with interest and curiosity.  Claire and I immediately took notes.  Once in a while somebody would be bemused by a certain detail in the report--an ice as big as his palm, complaints of headaches, possibilities of internal hemorrhage.  For us, who were merely there to look for stories, this was just another case of police incident worthy of being published in the papers.  Everything changed when we turned our backs and saw, to our utter horror, the 13-year-old suspect, sitting just behind us, his mother in tow, apparently tired from all the crying.

And not only that.  Seated beside the two was--to more of our aghast--the mother of the victim, feeling lifeless from all the tears cried just hours before.  I instantly felt bad.  In front of us is a mere document reporting the incident, and just behind us are the actual people involved.  I couldn't have felt more guilty for being so insensitive about some of my comments a few minutes ago.

Since the people were there anyway, we decided to ditch the blotter and interview them instead.  The mother of the suspect had crimson swollen eyes, apparently from crying.  But she managed to speak, anyway.  I don't know why but from the look in her eyes I felt really bad.  When we interviewed the mother of the victim, she looked lifeless but was surprisingly able to narrate the incident that transpired.  The usual inquiry into the details of the incident transpired.

Here's the 411:  Boy1 was asked by his mother to buy some ice from a nearby sari-sari store.  On his way home, he chanced upon Boy2 playing water guns with the little kids.  When he passed by, intentionally or unintentionally, Boy2 doused him with water from his water gun.  Boy1 retaliated and hit Boy2 in the arm and on the head.  Boy2 suffered a gaping wound in the head.  They both headed home.  Boy2 complained of headaches and was vomiting blood.  Mother of Boy2 was still in the hospital (where she works), and was being texted that her son has a severe headache and was vomiting.  She wasn't told her son had a wound from being hit by ice.  When she came home, she found out what happened and rushed the boy to the nearby district hospital.  But the mother thought better and took the boy to the hospital where she works, but they were given estimates of the projected costs of the operations, asking if they can pay that much money.  Seeing as to how they're being intimidated because they didn't have the money, they transferred the boy to PGH.  Unfortunately imaging devices in PGH were all broken, so they had to order CT Scan outside.  But it was midnight.  They had no money.  They couldn't do anything.  The boy died at around 4:30 in the morning.

Mind you, they live in Novaliches and they took the boy all the way to PGH in Taft because of the incidents they had to grapple with.  Somehow I took pity on the mother, because had quick actions been taken instead of intimidating people with large sums of money and the possibility of not being able to pay, then the boy would have survived the tragedy.

Then again, I can't go on pointing fingers at anybody.  For all I know I don't understand the intricacies of the medical profession, but somehow I feel that giving highfalutin estimates of probable hospital costs isn't at all proper.  And what's even more disappointing is the fact that the mother works in that hospital (although not as a medical crew, but as maintenance).  They could've just taken the bill from the mother's salary or whatever.  Don't they have hospitalization benefits for their employees?  It's disheartening, really.

After interviewing the mother, who miraculously didn't break into tears (thank God 'cause I would've cried as well), both Claire and I felt... lifeless.  Claire was almost in tears when we rode the taxi.  I didn't know what to do.  I wanted to scream.  I thought, if this is the kind of things I'd have to get used to at work, then I don't want to get used to it at all.  I secretly wished not being assigned in the Police Beat when I finally get to work, because I don't want to endure that kind of torture just to get a good story.

This incident got my mind really thinking.  Is it the pursuit of a good story, or the need to air out people's basic needs to the public?  With this recent incident, we decided to focus on the angle that the mother was practically refused hospital care because they didn't have the money.  Sigh... good thing I wasn't assigned to write this one, otherwise I'd find it really hard.

So we went back to the NUJP headquarters, two stories in hand, feeling defeated, hungry, lifeless... we worked on our stories and by 2:30 PM were already finished.  I waited for Claire to finish her survey story, then we strode off to the office.

If it weren't for Claire's quick thinking, we would've been run over by approximately three vehicles while crossing different streets because of my absent-mindedness.  What can I do?  I've had merely 4 hours of sleep yesterday and all I gulped to keep me awake were one can of nescafe iced coffee and a large cup of Coke Zero from 7-Eleven.

When we arrived at the office, sleepy and all, Ate Kate gave us our tasks.  Claire looked for articles about NAIA and PIATCO, and I helped Ate Kate search for figures (for Sunday Inquirer Magazine's Figure It Out section) about Philippine Festivals.  It was quite an easy task but once again, I drowned in all the numbers I couldn't make sense of.  That was basically how the night went.

In between, however, we gobbled tons and tons of food.  In one instance, Ate Shiatsi (somebody tell me the correct spelling of her name!!!  Haha) received a call from a higher-up, telling her to go outside.  She quickly grabbed pen and paper, thinking she'll be given an assignment to do.  When she returned, she said, "Ate, Kate, mukhang mahirap nga." referring to the task at hand.  When we saw her, she was bearing a box of pizza on her hands.  "Mukhang kailangan natin ng tulong nila..." referring to us interns.  Hehe.  Teamwork is fun, especially when food is involved.

A few hours into my work and I received a call from a friend who's also in the office, Gibbs Cadiz.  I've known Gibbs from the blogosphere and didn't even realize he's a Lifestyle Editor for the Inquirer until a few months back.  He told us to come over the lifestyle department and grab some dinner.  Obedient interns as we are, Claire and I obliged.  We came back with two heaps of different food, plus an awesomely delectable cake to boot (the one that melts in your mouth that I've heard so much of).  Now I know what they meant when they said that working in the PDI Office can really make you gain weight.  I now understand why that spiral staircase from hell was placed there.  Hehe.

The remaining hours of the night was spent laughing over an assignment given to Ate Shiatsi.  She was asked to research about the Pope wearing red Prada shoes.  The first time I heard it, the only thing that came to mind was The Devil Wears Prada. So I told them, if we go by the screwed logic of the universe, since The Devil Wears Prada and now we know that the Pope wears Prada, does it mean that the Pope is The Devil??!  Sacrilegous Horrors!!!  Hahaha.  Of course I was kidding.

All in all the first week of internship had been a blast.  If you've been religiously following this internship blog, then you already know that even though we break our backs to work off 12 hours, we're still happy with what we're doing.  Of course there's some amount of sugar-coating added to it ('cause hello, jumping from one city to another in a mass transit system definitely isn't that fun), I believe the general feeling is more of happiness and fulfillment.

Now I can say that I'm more than prepared to tackle the week ahead!  (Sad, though, because Claire won't be around)