I didn’t understand life until I almost lost it. My most defining moments unfolded in hospitals. Each visit instilled lessons I never encountered on the streets or in classrooms. Pediatric wards, emergency rooms, and intensive care units have been the setting for the defining scenes of my life. My experiences in these places not only shaped my understanding of mortality and illness, but also documented the first signs of my existence.
New life is usually discovered through morning sickness or a positive pregnancy test, but mine began as an anomaly. On the day Ma was scheduled for her first chemotherapy session, her doctor ordered a final round of blood work to check her levels. Ma’s elevated hormones recorded my presence in the world. .
To chemo or not to chemo?
If she continued with treatment, the drug would neutralize the zygote, thus dissolving me. But continuing the pregnancy would have a massive toll on her already frail body. Ma's doctors urged her to proceed with chemotherapy to eradicate what remained of the disease, but she feared she wouldn’t wake up from the procedure. She had fought too long to let the cancer win and take her away from her family.
As I grew older, I convinced myself I was unintended. Unlike my brothers, I was not wished for. Ma and Pa longed for a child after marriage—hence the firstborn. When my eldest brother wanted a sibling, they gave him the middle child. I was the ember that flickered in their moment of warmth, before the radiation reshaped my mother’s womanhood.
What engrossed everyone about my birth story is how Ma's cancer cells vanished during her first oncology check-up after giving birth. Doctors offered no medical explanation, and many accepted my birth as a miracle—a mythology that rippled through my kin and our community. I do not know whether I healed her or whether our survival was just one in a million. What I am certain of, however, is that it embodies a rare mutualism between a mother and child: you grow me, I heal you. A relationship where, for once, no one had to die.
By the time I was three, I already knew the intricacies of hospitals when her cancer relapsed.
My first hospital visit as a family member also marked the first time my brain shifted from running on autopilot to retaining memories. If my mind serves me right for something that happened more than 20 years ago, I would have been wearing a white sando (what Americans call a wife beater) and kid-sized basketball shorts. The sound of announcements echoed through the public hospital ward, where roughly eight beds stood separated by flimsy curtains.
Someone bigger held my hand—my father, perhaps, or my oldest brother. They guided me to a bed with metal railings. A bag of saline hung from a pole beside it, and I watched the solution drip into a vial that managed its depletion. I pointed my left index finger at the fluid trickling toward Ma’s hand. I was unable to grasp the physics behind the motion, nor the significance of witnessing my mother lying in a hospital bed. Yet, I found this pre-op protocol fascinating. “Hi, Bhie,” Ma said—a contraction for baby, or perhaps a stand-in for the letter B in bunso, the Filipino word for the youngest child. It was just hours before she went under anesthesia. She managed a soft smile, the kind that parents often perfect to disguise fear. I hopped onto her bed, brimming with joy at our reunion, oblivious that she might never return home.
After a blur of time in the hospital, my next memory is of my brother holding my hand as we stepped into our home. Inside, I saw our middle brother and the rest of the cousins gathered in our multi-family household, watching late-night television. Perhaps no one felt ready to sleep yet, all of us quietly awaiting updates on our matriarch’s operation. My middle brother pulled out a stack of discs—some bought from record stores, others burned at home—and began sifting through them. He decided it was the perfect night for an Ice Cube film, thus introducing me to my first Hollywood film.
I couldn’t follow the film’s plot, only mimicked their laughter whenever I saw them laugh. In retrospect, my cognition must have presented what developmental psychologists call “mimicry.” I cry if you cry; I laugh if you laugh. Perhaps, my brother did what he could to shield me from their fears—to distract everyone, if only for a while, from the quiet anxiety that gripped the room.
Ma bested the disease the second time, but learning the lessons of mortality is part of the course of life. For the first few years of my childhood, I saw the world—and hospitals—as extensions of family. As a child, adults said that hospitals are no place for children, but they were wrong. It wasn't long before I, too, became a patient.
Five years later, at age eight, watching a camera journey through the nasal passages ignited an early interest in the practice of medicine. Ma and I went to see an ear, nose, and throat (ENT) doctor because my snoring worried her. She hoped a prescription would ease the airway obstruction. The doctor proposed the removal of my tonsils. He explained that I showed signs of sleep apnea, and that my blocked airway could eventually lead to heart disease. His solution promised long-term relief from the disorder—and the chance to avoid something far worse.
“If I developed a heart problem,” I asked, unaware of human biology as an eight-year-old, “would taking out my tonsils make me okay?” The doctor held his breath. His face projected a tinge of sadness you would expect from someone who delivers bad news. “Unfortunately, no,” he said. “Heart disease doesn’t go away once you have it.”
As a kid, I didn’t yet have the sensibility to grasp the weight of my health, so my attention drifted from the conversation to a far corner of the room. I observed a doctor in cerulean scrubs standing in front of a screen, arms folded, watching a recording. The footage showed a camera journeying through someone’s nose, and as the camera travelled deeper, I sat there, engrossed, wondering what the camera might reveal.
But before I could find out what they were searching for, Ma said it was time to leave. We didn’t speak on the way out of the hospital. Her mind wandered through the scenarios the doctor had laid out; mine lingered on what he had discovered inside the patient’s nose.
In the end, I never got my tonsils removed. From my understanding, they did not have the heart to risk their child going under anesthesia. We never returned for follow-up appointments.
I had my first hospital admission at age 10, and it was then that I understood how having loved ones around made recovery more bearable. My cousin and I both contracted dengue fever. I caught the fever first, and I suspected the mosquito that bit me drained my infected blood and passed it to him.
After days of fluctuating temperatures, the adults brought us to an emergency room and where we were admitted. Hydration was crucial, and both of us needed IV access. His veins popped on his hand, making it easy for the nurses to find a good one. My chubby arms, however, gave the nurses a challenge. A veteran nurse had to step in to secure an IV. They did so, but at the expense of a meltdown. The agony from the third sting shattered my bravado and I cried.
When the time came for us to rest in separate wards, my cousin and I demanded to stay in the same room. The hospital honored our request, but still billed us as two separate patients. The room contained a single bed, an IV pole, and a window overlooking the bustling wet market below. My cousin climbed in first, taking the wall side, while I took the edge for easier access to the bathroom. The nurses looped his IV line above my head to prevent it from getting tugged or pinned. They shortened mine around the pole.
The next morning, I awoke to the smell of isopropyl alcohol and a gentle hand lifting my right arm. A nursing student sanitized my index finger with a wet wipe, and the warmth of my body quickly evaporated its dampness. I moved carefully, not wanting to wake my cousin or tug at the IV line in his hand. The sharp clink of the fingerstick hastened my heartrate. It wasn’t as daunting as a syringe, but it was still a needle.
"It will be quick," the nurse said.
Yes, but would it be painless?
My cousin found it amusing that I was frightened by needles and freaked out whenever my blood leaked out of the IV line. He said that he no longer saw in me his roguish cousin, the one who used to staple his fingers out of curiosity and laugh it off when my brothers removed the wires. He said I had gotten soft and pointed out that he was starting to see me exercise discernment, calling it “learning by bleeding.” .
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For a decade after my last hospital stay, I didn’t think about morality and the afterlife. Then I contracted sepsis from an unknown virus during the outbreak of a global pandemic, and I got to experience the ER’s protocol for patients suspected of having Covid-19.
It was on Cyber Monday, and I planned to tour a prospective university. Sitting on the bus, something odd had caught my eye in my peripheral vision. My temples throbbed, and each pulse sent shockwaves that distorted my perception. My heart began to beat double time, and a pressure built behind my eyes, as though blood flow was restricted and something was clogged in my vessels. I couldn’t breathe through my nose, so I had to remove my face mask to breathe properly.
I called a ride home for safety. I passed out as soon as I entered my room and woke up around 5 PM. My heartbeat still fluctuated and a mild pressure at the back of my head signaled a clarion call, urging me to go to the emergency room.
The moment I arrived in the ER, I was pulled from different areas for triage and assessments until they eventually secured me in an isolation room. A couple of nurses entered, carrying a hospital gown and an array of apparatus. I figured they’d attach some electrodes, hook me up to machines, and draw a few vials of blood for cultures—routine, I thought. But I froze when they unpacked not one, but two gigantic needles from a minted box. Instinctively, my arm jerked away from the nurse holding the first needle.
“Do you really need to do it on both arms?” I asked. In her most professional tone, the nurse explained that they had to insert two cannulas as part of the Covid-19 emergency protocol. Blood draws never scared me much; nurses and phlebotomists usually reassured me that they used baby-sized needles—a typical comforting script they use to soften our fear.
As I lay on the hospital bed, my thoughts drifted beyond the immediate pain, and my mind revisited the philosophies I hold on to from my reading and writing. The antibiotics helped my immune system fight the virus, but the thought of dying compelled me to think of the afterlife. Amid the swell of cosmic dread, I recalled a conversation with a writing mentor from the Philippines, when I had asked him about atheism and the afterlife. He urged me not to lose my sanity over the idea of nothingness, reminding me that we had already passed through it once, before we ever existed. As he put it, we came from nothing, became something, and will eventually cycle back to nothing.
My existential conundrum triggered a memory from my Filipino literature class in high school. We were reading Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) when my teacher explained how one of the characters, Pilosopo Tasyo (Tasyo the Philosopher), approached the idea of death. According to her, Tasyo believed that death was blissful. To him, dying meant release from the mundane problems of humanity and attachment to worldly possessions. Once you transcend towards the afterlife, true happiness awaits. I wanted to believe in Rizal’s claim, but what he offered was merely a perspective—it lacked the empirical weight to truly convince me.
The contrast between void and bliss loomed before me like two attendants, each asking which path I wished to take. Before I could choose, a knock echoed from the outside of the isolation room. The ER doctor informed me that I had contracted a viral infection, but assured me it wasn’t COVID. With that, she cleared me for discharge, though I needed to complete my fluids and antibiotics.
I had survived, but the fear of the afterlife lingered like the last stubborn bacterium resisting antimicrobial soap. This iota of fear grew, and still returns, at times of vulnerability.
Hospitals are often seen as somber settings, where people turn the last page of their story. But the ones I’ve known also cradled beginnings—spaces where oracles of life and death whispered truths.
In my search for meaning, a therapist told me to surrender to the unknown and find solace in the myriad possibilities of the afterlife. This medically induced existential crisis should not blind me to appreciating the beauty of the present. “The world,” he told me, “is too grand for any of us to know the absolute.” Maybe he’s right—maybe I spend too much of my time on something for which I can never prepare.
Still, with a few more years of living, I hope to one day wake up and laugh at this deep-seated anxiety that once held me so tightly. For now, I’ll seek solace beyond hospital walls and explore the things that remind me not to fear death.
Image Credit: Pinterest
Author Bio
Chris Ceguerra is a Filipino writer and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied media, journalism, and creative writing. A 2022 California Humanities Emerging Journalist Fellow, he now contributes news and feature stories to a local daily. He writes personal essays on pop culture, immigrant life, the arts, and technology. Outside of writing, he enjoys indie and international films, medical narratives, and sending memes. Chris also loves pandas and is a sucker for claw machines.