“Isolation” it read above the door to his wing. I noticed it because of the bold gothic print it was written in. Rather odd for a children’s wing. His father led Me, Krystle, and Megan to Marvin’s bed. His cousin was manually pumping oxygen into his small body and his eyes were rolled back in his head. Mr. Brayog took over the pump and I watched Marvin’s chest rise and fall at a pace equal to each compression. He has bacterial meningitis. It has affected his brain so severely that he will never fully recover, even with proper medical treatment. The thought came to mind—this is no way to live— in a room that smells of both urine and sickness while a family member controls each breath you take. I squatted down next to the bed and began to pray for Marvin and his family.
The previous day Krystle had spent several hours at the hospital and running from pharmacy to pharmacy to get the medication needed for him. His meningitis was causing him to have seizures. The first dosage of the medication was administered last night, but when we saw him today, he was comatose.
After a while, Krystle took over the pump, and I went to talk with the family of the little girl two beds down. Raelyn is four years old, also with meningitis. Her grandmother told me she has been in the hospital for almost two weeks now, and she is improving every day. I looked around the room and listened to the conversations. Marvin, Raelyn, and the two other children nearest to me all suffer from meningitis. In the bed beyond 
Marvin’s lay a girl so malnourished that the bones in her shoulders looked more like a skeleton.
The doctor came to make her rounds, with the nurses following behind her. They all wore masks over their mouths and noses, and when the doctor spoke to us, she told us that we should also be wearing masks as the children were all contagious. The sign made a little more sense now, but I felt like it was the children that were being isolated, not the sickness. The doctor took some time to talk with Mr. Brayog, and after explaining to him in Tagalog, she told us [in English] what she had said. Marvin was transferred to this hospital two days before and had a seizure upon entry to the emergency room. Because of that, they had to intubate him. Now he would be unable to breathe on his own if the oxygen tube was removed. She said that he was critical and too far gone, and it was only a matter of time before he passed away. As a parent, what do you do when someone tells you that? The three of us girls were not sure what to do from our point of view, either, but we wanted to try to encourage the family as best as we could. So, though he could not understand, we signaled to Mr. Brayog that we wanted to pray over him and Marvin before leaving.
Just after lunch, only an hour since we left the hospital we found out that the family had decided to remove the breathing tube so that they could take Marvin home to allow him to pass away there. We were scheduled to visit another pastor, so we had to leave the base. A while later we received the news that the ICM doctor had confirmed that Marvin passed away sometime around three pm this afternoon. Our hearts go out to his family.
*I encourage you to read about this situation from Seth’s perspective in his three blogs. One, Two, Three.
