Magandang araw po sa inyong lahat.

My name is Marisol, and I am writing this on behalf of my father, Ramon, who is 63 years old and has been a jeepney driver along the Cubao-Montalban route for thirty-one years. Anyone who has ridden that line in the mornings probably knows him. He is the one who refuses to leave the terminal until the last student has a seat, even when it means he loses a whole trip.

Last February my father started getting tired in a way that rest did not fix. He would come home, sit on the step by the door, and stay there for an hour before he could manage the stairs. We thought it was his age, or the heat, or the long hours. In April he collapsed at the terminal and was brought to the district hospital, and that is where we learned that his kidneys had been failing quietly for years. The doctor used the words "end stage" and I did not hear anything else she said for a long time.

He now needs haemodialysis three times a week. PhilHealth covers a portion of the sessions, and we are grateful for it, but the coverage runs out well before the year does. Each session past the covered ones costs us between four and five thousand pesos once the medicines and the transport are counted. The arteriovenous fistula surgery he needs so that the dialysis stops damaging his arms is another sixty thousand on its own, and the vascular surgeon has already told us that waiting makes it worse, not cheaper.

We have sold what could be sold. The jeepney went first, in May, which is its own kind of grief because it was not only our income but the thing my father built his whole life around. My mother has gone back to taking in laundry. My brother left his second year of college and is now working nights at a warehouse in Valenzuela. Between the three of us we can cover the household and about half of the treatment, and the half we cannot cover is the half that keeps him alive.

So I am asking for help, which is not a thing our family has ever been good at.

If you want to help but the platform fee bothers you, you can send it straight to my GCash instead, the number is 0917 555 0134 and it is under my name, Marisol. My tita also says people sometimes prefer a bank, so the BDO account number is 0045 8827 3391 under Ramon's name. Any amount is a help, truly, and it goes to the same place either way.

Every peso goes to the hospital directly. I keep the receipts in a folder and I will post photographs of every single one, the way I have been doing on my own page since May. If my father gets his fistula and his sessions for the rest of the year, I will say so here and I will stop asking. If something changes, I will say that too.

Thank you for reading all of this. Thank you for even considering it. My father does not know I have written this, and he would be embarrassed by it, so if you see him on the route please just let him drive.

Maraming salamat po.