A seaman’s near-death experience

A seaman’s near-death experience
Ingming Aberia March 3, 2021 https://www.manilatimes.net/2021/03/03/opinion/columnists/a-seamans-near...

HERE is more from the story of Ephraim Benavidez that I shared with readers three weeks ago (“Perils of seafaring,” The Manila Times, Feb. 10, 2021).

To recall, I wrote that Benavidez used to be an able-bodied seaman. His seafaring career abruptly ended with an accident aboard a cargo ship in the Faroe Islands, Denmark (not Norway, as I wrote) on Nov. 3, 2019. He was trying to help his fellow excavator driver unhitch warehouse covers when the traverse of the excavator pinned him to the steel stairs.

He was brought to the nearest hospital and later airlifted to Haukeland University Hospital, Norway (which is closer than Denmark, approximately the distance from Manila to Hong Kong), for a more comprehensive medical procedure.

He sustained multiple injuries so gross that his attending physicians in Norway wondered how he came out of them alive. His physical impairments included fractures in spinal processes, extensive thoracic injury, dislocated rib fractures, blocked carotid artery (resulting in unstable blood circulation), acute respiratory failure, acute kidney failure and rhabdomyolysis (caused by dead muscle fibers resulting from muscle injury), etc.

Blood had to be drained from his chest to clear his breathing and facilitate better circulation. He also experienced bleeding from a cerebral contusion. The more serious fractures in his body needed surgical treatment. He was intubated while he experienced respiratory gaps; and forced diuresis (induced production of urine) was applied to arrest his renal failure.

The doctors recommended lifelong medication with acetylsalisylic acid (used to reduce pain, fever or inflammation) and a statin (to reduce illness and mortality in those who are at high risk of cardiovascular disease).

He was mostly under sedation while at the hospital (he was in the intensive care unit for two weeks). In his sleep, Benavidez wandered around the globe.

His near-death adventures started with an encounter with white-dressed women who appeared to be engrossed in a prayer meeting. He saw moving clouds as their background. He pleaded with them to help him find his way home. They did not respond, except to shoo him away with hand gestures.

On his next subconscious trip, he found himself confined at a Manila hospital. He asked the nurses why nobody from his family was visiting him. By this time his shipping company, Crystal Shipping, had already contacted his wife, Ana, for her consent to allow the hospital in Norway to conduct surgical operations on Ephraim.

The day after the accident, a Sunday (Philippine time), I was with a group of people that included Ana. We were on our way to a meeting. She drove her own car, but midway to our destination, she decided she could not continue and rode with us instead. Hours earlier, somebody had told her that he saw Ephraim in the neighborhood, aboard a jeepney.

Pain and drugs probably worked against Ephraim’s subconscious disposition. He suspected that people were out to kill him and his wife. Luckily, he was able slip away to board a ship bound for Canada, where he was tortured. Same morbid things happened in places where he managed to escape: the Caribbean, Japan, then finally China.

Back at the hospital in Norway, medical staff could hardly talk to him in his waking hours. He made no sense to them; even when Ana finally arrived in Norway and reached the hospital, he advised her to look out for people out to get them.

After a month of confinement, Ephraim was discharged on Dec. 2, 2019. The couple was back in the Philippines three days later.

They consulted me on their insurance claim for disability benefits which they had not yet received a year after the accident. By then they were hard-pressed coping with daily needs and barely getting by.

They got paid last month (first week of February 2021), thanks to the speedy processing by Danish authorities. But the payment was based on the medical assessment by the doctor assigned by Crystal Shipping that was, in my view, flawed.

The OCW Medical Clinic, the Crystal Shipping-assigned physician, issued a medical declaration of Grade 8 (ankylosis of one shoulder, the shoulder blade remaining rigid) on July 7, 2020 (214 days after Benavidez showed up for further medical treatment, where 120 days is the maximum under government regulations) for purposes of determining the amount due to him as claimant of disability benefits. On that basis, the Danish authorities gave him the equivalent of only 8 percent of the total disability benefits he could have been entitled to. (There were two sets of claims: disability and loss of earning capacity. He got a more or less fair compensation for loss of earning capacity.)

On Jan. 20, 2021, I emailed OCW, using an email address in its letterhead, to seek clarification on its medical findings on Benavidez. A higher grade (given the medical report from Norway) could have allowed him to receive a bigger amount of disability benefit.

I have yet to receive a reply from OCW. However, a Crystal Shipping staff I copied in the OCW request volunteered to clarify that the medical case in question was now closed.