day 3: the blood hunt

We are ready to leave the children in the neighbor's house again.  Their belongings are already in a big basket-- including the portable DVD player, the stack of Dora VCDs, the milk, and the clothes-- when my brother and his wife arrive, all the way from Commonwealth, Quezon City.  They will watch the kids for the day.  One less thing to worry about.

We go back to Orthopedic Center.  We are given a form that says we have to provide 3 units of Type O+ blood for the surgery.  We could opt to buy the blood from a blood bank, or bring donors.  We checked the procedure for donors.  We are told that we have to bring five donors by 8:00 am on Monday or Wednesday, and each one has to have a government-issued ID card.  The blood bank can only accept donors for thirty patients.  We are also told that we should come very early as there is a long queue on blood collection days. To expedite the surgery schedule, we decide to buy the blood somewhere else.  After all, it's Sunday, and Ate Malou's mother has arrived to watch her.

Two dozen phone calls to hospitals and blood banks, and not a single one of them has Type O in stock.  Somebody advised us that it may be better to go to the hospitals ourselves and check.  My husband and I went to seven hospitals in Quezon City and Manila in search of blood.  Only one of them sold us a single bag.  We rushed it back to Orthopedic Center and resumed the rounds.

We called it off at 6:00 pm so my brother and his wife could go home.  On our way back to Cavite, we still checked the hospitals we passed along the way.  They all said they don't have blood in stock.  In one of them, in fact the private hospital where I first brought Ate Malou on Friday, I casually asked where they get the blood if their patient needs it.  I was told, the Philippine Blood Center.  I already called the Blood Center earlier in the day, with no success.  I was told that they have a waiting list, and the waiting list is for hospitals, not individual patients.

The hospitals do have blood, but they're mostly reserved for their own patients.  The usual practice is to ask the patient to provide donors in exchange of the blood that they need.  In our case, we could round up possible donors, but it will take a lot of time.  Several hospitals gave us telephone numbers of other blood banks.

I have never been so ready to call it a day, but I have to listen to the children's little stories about their day, and wash the dishes, and straighten the house again.  I check the laundry basket and decide that we can survive another day or two on the clean clothes that we have.  We resume the calls to the relatives to see who can spare someone to stay with us in the next couple of weeks.

The last task for the day is to check Google Maps to see where the Red Cross offices are located, so we can plan our route the next day.