YOUTH VIOLENCE AND HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS NEGLIGENCE

this was published last 10 October 2003

BATANG MINDANAW
Stop youth violence and
negligence of health care professionals


By Kathleen Ann P. Rivero / Ateneo de Davao University

DAVAO CITY -- May 31, 2003. It was a cool, crisp night... a night that promised goodbye to summer heat. It was a night to welcome cool, stormy June. It was a night to pack summer away and draw breath before foraging into the battles of the incoming schoolterm. It was a night of revelry, contentment, and excitement to be spent with people closest to one. It was the eve that ushered in a new kind of life.
And open a new kind of life it did, but not one that was expected. It was supposed to bring good times, instead it brought sorrow --­ the kind that would remain for eternity, the kind that would forever change the lives of those it touched.

His name was Erick John Balayon Rico. He was almost 22 years old, an average guy all round -- fun loving, carefree, well-loved by those who knew him, even by the security guards at school. He majored in Sociology, but was more at home with the Sandawa-Apo Mountaineering and Ecology Club. He was your typical youth, carting around a baggage of angst and uncertainty that comes with being young. Gone too soon, this world will never know him otherwise.

It began as a night out with friends to celebrate the close of summer classes and the mountaineering club’s conquest of Mt. Apo. Erick took time off celebrating to commiserate with a friend who was having problems of the heart. Little did he know that this act would set in motion events that would end his life on that night.
The events that night weren’t that clear to us. All we can remember is that the crying friend had a boyfriend and the boyfriend was mad. Then we were in the car driven by the crying girl, and she drove us to where her angry boyfriend and his gang were. I remember Erick pushing the rest of us into a taxi to get us out of what was shaping up to be an ugly confrontation. We made it to the taxi, Erick did not. He got mauled, and his attackers left him down on the pavement. And the crying girl? -- the one who drove Erick to his doom, the one he tried to comfort on the night when he could have been living it up? Well, she transported Erick’s assailants away from the crime scene. She left Erick down on that pavement. As it would eventually turn out, she left Erick to die.

It was 2:30 a.m. of June 1 when Erick was brought to a government hospital. The emergency staff gave him a cursory check and dismissed his woes as a product of drunkenness from which he would awaken from after six hours. But he never did wake up.

It was morning before Erick’s relatives got the information. His uncle brought him to another hospital where a CT scan performed at 11 a.m. showed severe cerebral swelling in the right cerebral hemisphere, subarachnoid hemorrhage with a large clot in the right middle fossa and middle cerebral artery cistern, intraventricular hemorrhage, herniation in the bilateral uncal and right subfacial region, as well as extracranial contusions. An operation would have had little change of saving him by then. The injuries he sustained were getting worse while he lay there in the emergency room of the government hospital where the physicians who admitted him said he would wake up from after six hours.

In the light of day, it seemed unreal to see Erick in bed and unresponsive. Until the day before, he was full of life. Anytime then, we were expecting him to get up and kid us all for our tears and mournful faces.
But he never did wake from his coma while family and friends trooped to his side as the life support machines kept him alive.

After two days, Erick stopped responding to treatment. His body rejected the medicines administered to him by the doctors. Erick was brain dead. It was time to end his earthly agony. His family agreed to take him off life support.

At 10:58 a.m. on Tuesday, June 3, 2003, we watched a friend die right before our eyes.

Now and then it crosses our minds that had he been rendered a thorough assessment in the government hospital where he was first brought, maybe --­ just maybe --­ he would still be alive today. Maybe, just maybe, if he wasn’t such a caring person who would stop to listen to someone’s woes, he would still be alive today.
But he’s dead. Erick was one of the hundreds of victims youth violence claims ever so often. The tragic violence I saw that night could only have been flavored by mind-altering alcohol or something more harmful. Since that night, I have often reflected on how alcoholic beverages and illegal substances could impair one’s judgment and influence violent behavior towards others.

In the dark of night, on nights like that night he died, I could almost hear Erick singing along with his idol, Bob Marley: “Conquer the devil with the thing called LOVE.” This, we’d like to think, is what the message of his death all about. Not youthful violence, not negligence of health professionals.

So long, Erick. You have finally climbed the highest mountain. Meet us at the peak when we get there, okay?

(Batang Mindanaw is the youth section of MindaNews. Contributions from young Mindanawons, students or those out of school, are welcome, including those from the not-so-young Mindanawons who want to reminisce growing up in Mindanao. Kathleen Ann Rivero is a Junior AB Mass Comm student at the ADDU. She wrote this piece in memory of a fellow member of the Sandawa-Apo Mountaineering and Ecology Club who died last summer.)