Nasario’s Story

Nasario: A Hospital Stay Just Barely Saves a Life, but the Economic Burden Will Be Felt for Years to Come

Manila, Phillipines

At first, two-year-old Nasario simply had a persistent cough. His mother, Shirley, turned to a traditional medicine healer to ward off the evil spirits that might be making her only child ill. She and her husband Fernando live in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, where families often seek traditional remedies first and turn to modern medicine later if the sickness persists.

Nasario’s condition did not improve. Fraught with worry, Shirley rushed Nasario to the National Children’s Hospital in the middle of the night. His breathing rate was nearly twice as fast as normal and his lungs were filling up with fluid, displacing his heart and airway. It became clear that he was suffering from pneumonia. In the intensive care unit, doctors inserted a tube in his lungs to drain the fluid and began administering antibiotics to treat the infection. Scared and uncomfortable, Nasario called out for his mother almost incessantly.

Shirley waited by his bedside to comfort and feed him during the treatment. Meanwhile, Fernando desperately sought a way to pay for the medical bills that climbed each day his son spent in the hospital. He swallowed his pride to beg family and friends for money, just barely scraping enough together to pay for treatment. At last, they received the results from a final chest x-ray: it appears the illness was caught just in time. The entire family breathed a sigh of relief.

Nasario, however, is one of the lucky ones. In the Philippines, one out of five children under five years of age suffer from pneumonia each year, and 9,000 die. Now that Nasario’s parents can recognize the symptoms of pneumonia, they will closely monitor their child so that he will not be among those that lose their lives to this deadly disease.

Helpful Links

• Survival TV. The Struggle to Breathe. Season 1, Episode 7. Aired on BBC on November 22, 2008. Video