the perils of

Hello! I'm back after radio silence. So much has happened since my last entry. So much that I've been putting off updating this thing for the longest time, knowing I would have to cover so much ground. To recap these events in the laziest way possible, here is a half-assed Buzzfeed-style listicle  for no one's reading pleasure but my own.  10 Really Important Events I Totally Put Off Writing About (In Chronological Order) 1 . Grad Ball.  We got dressed up and headed out to Sofitel for our batch graduation ball. Rap had just returned from his elective in Batanes that morning, where he had spend most of his time under the heat of the scorching sun. So here he is looking all brown and crispy on the outside. 2. Boards Review.  I'll post a separate blog about this later on, but for now do check out these photos from the most nerve-wracking, anxiety-filled 2 months of my life. Well, not really. ASMPH has been very loving towards its board ...

I was reading this article about building clinician empathy, and one of the suggestions it made was to offer debriefing sessions for students and residents whenever their patients die. I remember the first time I ever saw someone die. I was a clerk (a fourth-year med student) rotating in Internal Medicine at a public hospital. It had been a busy night in the ER. I'd spent most of the day on my feet doing random tasks: IV insertions, blood extractions, patient interviews. My feet were aching for some rest. Just when the workload was starting to slow, and the comforts of resting my butt on a monobloc chair resurfaced in my mind, someone's cardiac monitor alarmed. A series of fast, metallic, monotone beeps, barely audible over the usual ER noises. Beep beep beep beep beep.  Doctors rushed to him - a middle-aged man, morbidly obese, whose dark brown skin had an ashy undertone. He wasn't breathing. The resident who was leading the team was cool and collected. She spok...

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 I have three unpublished drafts lined up in my Blogger dashboard, each one maybe 3 paragraphs long.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...

       There's something about this weekend that is making me absurdly happy.        Maybe it's that my duty schedule is permitting me to sleep in on a Sunday. Or maybe it's that the busy street near my condo is closed to cars, and is currently populated by only happy families riding bicycles and stupid teenagers trying to show each other up with skateboard tricks. Wow listen to me, calling teenagers "stupid" and openly resenting them as an age group. How grown-up sounding!        Maybe it's that I had the time to go out and get a decent breakfast (pancakes, a sausage, and some iced coffee from McDonald's in case you were wondering). Or that afterwards, I got to watch Gilmore Girls on Netflix while simultaneously practicing watercolor painting.        I think the magic of this weekend really stems from me finally having the time and space to just work on being  myself . See, my rotation...

>SUBJECTIVE<        On Week 4 of Clerkship. Haven't been posting online much to maintain the privacy of patients, doctors, and batchmates alike. But here's what I can safely say:        In [hospital name redacted], clerks are generally not allowed to do much. On occasion, we run to Radiology to get initial reads on X-rays, do paperwork during emergencies (known as "codes"), and, if we're lucky, admit patients. Right now, because we haven't rotated yet in [name of public hospital redacted], we aren't skilled enough to be able to confidently perform procedures like blood extraction. But sometimes a nice intern or nurse will let us do these things under their supervision. Other than that, we mostly spend our days reading our patients' charts, learning their stories.         I was telling all this to one of my batchmates and he gave me a funny look and asked "If that's all you do, why do you guys always complain ab...

      Hello folks. It's me. A lot of big things have been going on lately and I haven't really had the energy to document them, which is really such a shame. I have a personal bias towards recording memories when they're fresh in your mind. But anyway, guess this will have to do.       Some things to get out of the way first:        Two weeks ago, I concluded the first project I've ever  organized in my life: Know Your Status Week. It's a week-long campaign to get medical students tested for HIV. I was lucky enough to have my batchmate Dex as my co-head, since he was able to invite this wonderful organization called the HIV/AIDS Support House, or HASH for short. They were able to provide free on-site screening in ASMPH. We also partnered with LoveYourself, my personal favorite HIV advocacy org. The amazing thing is, a total of 193 people on campus got themselves tested - and that includes not only students but als...

        Hello, blog. It's been SO long since I've last updated you. Lots of interesting things have been popping up in my life, but I've just been so preoccupied with keeping my head afloat in med school. I haven't really been paying much attention to anything other than my transes.         I'm sorry.         Anyway, today I just had the urge to write because I just came from my Revalida. For those of you who don't know what this is, a brief explanation: The Revalida, also known as an Oral Integrative Exam, is an oral exam that comes at the end of your second year in med school in which you have to integrate everything you've learned during the year. The format of it is you're first given a written case to read. Then you have 30 minutes (or less, depending how long it took you to read the case) to read up on the case using one book of choice (for most people, it's Harrison;s Principles of Internal Medicine)....

It's been a stressful week. Okay, every week is a stressful week. But lately I've really been more stressed than usual. To the point that I think- no, I know - I'm getting burned out.  The most distressing symptom of burnout is apathy. The past few days, my emotions have been blunted. I don't laugh as hard as I used to. I don't smile as much as before. The sad things don't make me so sad. The stupid things don't make me so angry. I still feel the #feels, but to a lesser degree. It's my Obstetrics exam on Monday, and people say it's one of the hardest. Judging by the events of this week, I am not at all surprised.  It's Friday night, and there's a huge, monstrous exam looming ahead. I cognitively know that I should be using tonight to study. There's so much to study. But I also congitively know that I'm headed towards a burnout, and if I don't give myself a break first, the consequences on my mental health would be ...

      Today was, overall, a good day for being a doctor-in-training.       This morning I volunteered at a medical mission at the Pasig City jail. The event was organized by alumni from the Ateneo Graduate School of Business (AGSB), and there were only 6 of us from ASMPH. One freshman, one sophomore (me), three juniors, and an Ophthalmology resident.        Weirdly enough, it was my first medical mission as a med student (ASMPH is not fond of medical missions). Few things I was expecting: One, that my sole contribution would be to take vital signs (blood pressure, temperature... all the basic stuff that can be learned in college). And two, that my patients would be scary, snarling inmates with tattoos on the inside of their eyelids. It is worth noting that neither of these things happened.        We got to the jail at around 9 AM because the traffic was bad and we got pretty lost along the way. When we got insi...

              Had the worst blood extraction EVER. I know my veins are so teeny tiny that they can turn a simple blood extraction into a full-blown treasure hunting expedition (beneath my skin, with a very sharp needle). Even the pro-est of the pro med techs are at a loss whenever I'm the patient, which always results in me being poked ~10 times more than the average person whenever I need a blood test.                But what I experienced earlier was seriously horrible. See, before the extraction, I gave Kuya Med Tech (KMT for short) a fair warning about my troublesome veins, hoping to allow him the opportunity to steel himself mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for what would be his most difficult blood extraction ever. So he spent what felt like a good 10 minutes searching for my mythical Antecubital Vein (notice the capitals, just like how one would capitalize the equally elusive Loch Ness Mon...