An attempt was made at an autobiography.

I am in the process of applying for a plantilla position somewhere, and one of the requirements is to write an "autobiography" about one's life. I figured, such an unusual requirement deserves an equally unusual style of writing. 

So here I recycled an old article I wrote for Filipina Pen and Ink back in 2015, describing the daily grind of a med student. I've updated it to reflect my recent experiences having finished med school already. 

Hope you enjoy reading.

* * * 

It’s 5 AM and I am jolted awake by the crowing of several roosters outside my window. For a few blissful seconds, I’m disoriented, and I don’t know who I am.

In the dim morning light, I make out the outline of the grotesque mascot from an anti-smoking poster. His cataractous eyes are reflected in the faint glint from a steel equipment cabinet shining with green alcohol bottles. The black form in the corner of the room sharpens into a writing desk cluttered by folders and records. The hardness of the mattress I lay on floats to the surface of my consciousness and I soon realize where and who I am. As the roosters crescendo, I wake up to another day as a Doctor to the Barrio living in her Rural Health Unit. 

I want to remain asleep in my hard bed but today we are vaccinating a small barangay deep in the mountains, and we must leave before the noontime tides make our task impossible. As I rub the sleepiness from my eyes and stretch out the soreness in my back, another thought floats to mind:

Why on Earth did I decide to be a doctor?

In a couple of med school application essays, I might have said that the decision was made for me when I visited a provincial hospital with my family to check on Manang Grace, our house help.

The ward was hot, humid, and severely packed with sick patients. It was so full that there would be two to three patients to one single bed. Manang Grace was lucky to have gotten a bed at all, even if she had to share it with a complete stranger. Her bed was only big enough for each occupant to have one leg resting on the mattress while the other dangled down the side. How anyone could have recovered in such a setup is a wonder to me, but one thing I knew for sure: Nobody should have to live like this! 

Sometimes I tell people that it was then that I knew I wanted to become a doctor. As if all of a sudden, a light bulb switched on inside my head, or a tiny spark ignited the tinder inside my heart, devouring it in an all-consuming blaze. Because really, wouldn’t that make a great story? The truth, I’m afraid, is a lot less magnificent.

The truth is that I’ve wanted to be a doctor since I was a little chubby kid. I grew up in a family of five in the beautiful city of Cagayan de Oro. Back then, my desire to be a medical practitioner roughly equaled my dreams of becoming a whole assortment of other jobs: zookeeper, astronaut, cashier, hammock-tester, Pokémon Master. 

But slowly I began to discover, as many other children do, that I really enjoyed being helpful. Being the eldest of two siblings (five years older than my sister and eight years older than brother) meant that aside from having the privilege of terrorizing two minions, I also had the responsibility of babysitting them when my parents were away, feeling their foreheads whenever they were feverish, and telling them bedtime stories late at night. In short, even though I didn’t realize it back then, I was already beginning to practice something at the heart of all good doctors: genuine care and compassion.

By the time high school rolled around and brought with it an onslaught of entrance exams and career talks, I had to seriously think about what I wanted in life. Taking a pre-med was definitely one of my choices, but so was a bunch of other things, like Political Science, Computer Science, Journalism, and even Filmography. My parents played a big part in my indecision, since they were so supportive of anything I wanted to do. 

Eventually, the tiebreaker came in the form of a little bookmark given to me during my senior retreat. The bookmark bore a quote from Romans 12:7: If your gift is serving others, serve them well. I took it as a sign. 

Through sheer luck, I applied for and was granted a full scholarship to study a pre-med course in the Ateneo de Manila University. College life and living away from my family was challenging, but I persevered. After graduating, I was fortunate enough to be granted another full scholarship, this time to the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health.

If college life was challenging, it was nothing compared to the hardships I experienced in med school. My initial excitement about getting into medicine quickly faded into misery as we were battered with seemingly endless waves of exams. The worst exams tested my ability to store and regurgitate the names of enzymes, names that were random arrangements of letters and numbers that seemed to exist for no purpose other than to give med students hell. It was excruciating. Every day I thought I was going to fail.

But for me, the most frustrating parts in med school weren’t the exams. They were when I was faced with another human being who is suffering, and I didn’t know what to say or do to make that person feel better.

One time during my hospital rotation in a public OB delivery room, the clerks, including myself, were tasked to handle basic caregiving tasks such as draining womens’ bladders and changing their bedpans. I was in the middle of changing out a bedpan when its owner reached out and grabbed my arm.

She was an elderly gravid in her mid-40s, about to deliver her eighth child. The hospital had run out of patient gowns and was low on anesthesia so on the delivery bed, she lay stark naked and twisted about in pain. As she squirmed about, she lamented how she had nobody in her life to help her support Child Number Eight. She worked as a food vendor and had been so focused on surviving each day that she had not had the time nor energy to even think of a name for her baby. She was actively making plans to give the baby away and pleading to me for help.

Her story brought tears to my eyes and I was speechless. How do I respond to her in this bitter moment where new life is about to be brought into a cruel world that cannot support it? How could I tell her that things will get better when the institutions that are created to protect women like her aren’t working? How could I provide comfort at all when we both lived in a system that was so broken and wrong? How do I help? 

I held her hand and let her squeeze it through her painful contractions. I would leave her side occasionally to tend to other patients - other catheters that needed inserting, other bedpans that needed changing - but always returned to her to hold her hand and receive her squeeze. 

I was there by her side when her cervix was fully dilated. I was there to wheel her into the delivery room. I was there to hear her baby’s first cries and take his first breath. When my shift ended, I squeezed her hand back, congratulated her on her successful delivery, and told her I would be back the next shift. 

The next day, I found her in the wards, cradling her newborn in her arms on a bed shared with two other women and their two other infants. Before I could say anything, she tearfully apologized for taking up too much of my time. I clasp her hand and think, if anyone is owed an apology here, it is she. 

It’s 5 PM and I lumber home, dragging my feet in the wake of the day’s vaccination activity. It was a success in most regards; the weather was clear, nobody had an adverse reaction to the vaccine, and the journey was safe. But it was difficult. It’s always difficult. That’s what makes it so easy to lose track of why I work in the first place. But on this particular day, I take a moment to pause and recollect. Why did I decide to be a doctor?

And it seems that now, I have come up with a better and more sincere reply.

I do it for my country. For people who have no access to healthcare. For people like the elderly gravid who had nobody else to listen to her concerns but the clerk changing her bedpan. For people like Manang Grace who have to sleep in sweaty wards on half-occupied beds.

I do it for my family. For my parents, who work endlessly to send me and my siblings to school. For my siblings, who study hard to be able to help my parents in the future. For my relatives who will one day fall into illness.

I do it for myself. For vanity, for the pride of being called Doktora. But also for the honor of being of service. For the endless opportunities to learn and grow and make a difference in other people’s lives.

It’s 8 PM. The anti-smoking mascot smiles at me through his tar-stained teeth, a morbid reminder of what happens to patients when systems fail them. His empty cataractous gaze watches over me as I lie on my hard mattress, resting myself for the next battle. It’s difficult, always difficult. But I find many more reasons to remain.