the perils of

I'm almost four weeks into my first ever job as a Doctor to the Barrio, and it's been an amazing ride so far. When I first found out about my assignment sometime in January, I was apprehensive. When you google Gigaquit, Surigao del Norte, there's not much information you can find. It's mostly just news articles about their recent spate of NPA attacks. As a baseline anxious person, I had a never-ending list of worries: What if I'm kidnapped? What if I'm killed? Or worse, what if there's no Internet??? I had no idea what I was getting into, and I would soon find out. 1. I'm a town celebrity - whether I like it or not. "Doctora, what's your complete name?" read the text from Gigaquit Municipal Health Officer, Dr. Roland Mira. Yup, I thought to myself, he's definitely making me a welcome tarp.  We'd never met in person before, but I'd heard much about him from mutual colleagues. A veteran doctor who'd spent most ...

In a rare moment of sipag , I'm actually outside right now on a free Sunday, reading an Obstetrics textbook instead of absent-mindedly scrolling through Netflix. In the middle of my reading about blood volume, I had a random flashback to this patient I had a couple of days ago at the health center. Around 12:45 PM, as we interns were eating lunch, a guy comes knocking at the door to the multispecialty clinic. That afternoon was our scheduled OB-Gyne time, and he was obviously neither an OB nor a Gyne case, so before I had even spoken to him I was sure that he was knocking at the wrong door.  Anyway, I opened the door and asked him what his concern was. He showed me his ankle. There was a wound on the lateral side, quite big, around the size of a five-peso coin. Dry, not actively bleeding, but still unhealed. He said a dog had bitten him a couple of weeks back, and that he had kept on scratching the area. I found it weird that two weeks after the event, the...

Can't escape the paperwork.             It's weird for me to be sitting at my keyboard, typing up something that isn't going to be submitted as an academic requirement. I've been away from blogging for so long. It's painful to restart. I'm constantly rereading these sentences as I create them, parsing each one before forcing myself to move on to the next one. Editing and editing. I have three unpublished drafts lined up in my Blogger dashboard, each one maybe 3 paragraphs long. Every time I go to my Blogger to begin writing, the sight of these drafts reminds me of my countless aborted attempts. What's with the melodrama?           A lot has happened in my life that I need to write about, but haven't been writing about because of the sensitive nature of the subject.  Ooh, sensitive how?          To put it vaguely, my stories aren't just my own. They're my patients', too, and I can...