the perils of

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...

I'm going to start a segment on my blog called "Favorites," where I'll just list down all my favorite things at the moment. It's not exactly a new segment; I've been doing it since the beginning of this blog, but this will be the first time I'm ever giving it a name. So, for my Favorite #1, here's a little insight into my favorite rotation: Psychiatry . For quite some time, whenever I'd get asked what specialty I wanted to take up after graduating from med school, I'd answer nothing (i.e. no specialization, just a general practitioner; I didn't just silently stare at them for a full minute and say nothing). For context, to take up a "specialty" often means you have to go through 3 to 5 more years of rigorous training, in addition to the 5 years of medical school you've already taken up. Going into training is like being a hospital slave: You don't control your hours, you get paid next to nothing, and you have to d...

Fourth day of my Psych rotation and I'm still psyched to be here Started the day with a delicious breakfast courtesy of the Psych department as well as an intriguing case presentation on a histrionic personality. I have ingested 2 cups of coffee, one of which was admixed with an entire pack of Milo The results of the March med boards came out today, and all 18 takers from ASMPH passed!!! CONGRATS!!! Updating this blog pretty regularly now To end this post, here is a random drawing I made:

Today's sudden outburst of unstructured writing is brought to you by The Princess Diaries rerun on Netflix. Sunday from-duty mornings when I have the condo all to myself = priceless Let me start by explaining that The Princess Diaries was one of my absolute FAVORITE movies back in grade school. Watching it now through the eyes of a 20-something-year-old, I see how much of the way I am today was affected by this movie, along with the original book series by Meg Cabot. If you're a fetus who doesn't understand what the movie is, or a male who previously dismissed this movie as another "chick film" and avowed to never ever see it, then I shall explain the premise. Mia Thermopolis is a super awkward, clumsy, frizzy-haired 16-year-old who suddenly learns that her father, whom she has been separated from her entire life, is actually the heir to the royal throne of the fictional European country of Genovia. The book series (and the first movie) centers on Mia...

I'm almost halfway through internship. Already took photos with a toga on. RSVP'd to the Graduation Ball. Celebrated the end of my major rotations. Kind of discovered that doing a Pedia residency is not such a bad idea. Yeah, Internship year seems to have gone by so fast. So fast that I've only actually written three blog posts about it - holy cow! How could I have let it come to this? I'm so sorry. I feel like every single blog post I've written in med school has started with some sort of lament on how seldom I've been updating this blog. Followed by a long period of me actually not updating this blog. Truth be told, the idea of keeping a blog just isn't appealing to me anymore. I don't feel comfortable with sharing so much of myself on the Internet. Scrolling back through my college era posts, I can't believe how much detail I would share about my life. I know nobody really reads my blog (not being humble; I legit can see the statistics, g...

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...