I WAS left with no choice but to wait for a vacant room in the emergency ward. My friend Twinkle was carefully massaging my left hand because the potassium they combined with my IV fluid was irritating my veins.

It was all so unfair really. After I was hospitalized last summer, I remember writing in my diary something like, “I’m never going to get sick again.” Then suddenly, dengue hit Iloilo’s shores and the waves swept me back to my favorite resting place: a hospital.

As all my exams, unfinished paper work and pending reports came to mind, tears of frustration fell from my “bullfrog eyes” caused by lack of sleep for two days due to nausea and fever. At that point, I was willing to give up anything (allowance included) to be anywhere but there. Except that, let’s face it, a person who is under observation for dengue fever needs to obey her doctor, especially if he happens to be your mother’s classmate in medical school.

By 1 o’clock in the morning, the nurse informed us that a bed was available in the Internal Medicine Ward. I learned a valuable lesson about human nature after that: You feel bad when you’re sick, but you feel even worse if everyone around you is. Waiting for 10 hours straight on a plastic chair suddenly seemed better than being confined in a room filled with old patients who were in a more critical condition. But it was too late to take back my decision.

Despite the depressing atmosphere in the ward, I met three interesting people in the course of my one-week hospital vacation. In the bed to my left was an old woman from a rich family. She never spoke Hiligaynon unless it was to her gay helper. One time, she used the bathroom for almost 20 minutes and the people lining up for their turn grew impatient. When she finally came out, she arrogantly told all of them: “It is not my fault if you decided to wait.” That made me laugh so hard that she glared at me.

To my right was another old woman who was suffering from pneumonia. Her doctor kept delaying her release because she never did as she was told. When she coughed, she swallowed the phlegm instead of spitting it out. It was really disgusting, but I had this gut feeling that she was doing it deliberately to annoy her children.

The last patient who caught my attention was different from the two. She was different in the sense that she was younger and good natured. She would always smile when someone passed by. In one of our conversations, I found out that she was eight months pregnant. But my happiness immediately changed to alarm when she revealed that she had typhoid and pneumonia. Before the day of my discharge, I was surprised when I saw her crying miserably. I was told later that her doctor had asked her to decide if she wanted to keep the baby.

Perhaps thanks to the tawa-tawa juice I drank daily, my platelets increased. When Saturday came, my condition was already stable. I was assured by my doctor that I could go home the next day. He suddenly grew a halo in front of my eyes.

After leaving the hospital, it was hard to go back to my normal life for a few days. I would wake up in the wee hours of morning expecting some nurse to inject needles in my arm. Sometimes, I would hear coughing in my head. At other times, I would recall amusing English retorts. Most of the time, I would hear crying. Not just of mothers but of babies.