In the words of Joan Didion

It is 10 pm. I am here in a shared room at Capitol Medical Center in Quezon City waiting for the little girl to get well. It has now been four days that she has been down with a still unidentified strain. She has rashes all over her face and her arms are filled with needle marks, no thanks to the regular blood tests she needs to take every now and then.

Here I am, dead-tired and sleep-deprived but my mind is just so wide-awake thinking of what went wrong, and where in the world did she get this strain? What did I do? What did I not do?

In times like this, I am reminded of the words of writer Joan Didion: "I don't think it's possible to have children without having a sense that you've failed them. And that's what I kept edging around, in there. You are always failing them, and they are always your ... hostages."