Med school documentation project fails! prffftt. lol
Hey J.
Did you know that sometimes i talk to you instead of God?
i once jokingly said that if medschool doesn’t work out for me, i’m gonna be a ballet dancer. it’s about a month now and ballet looks more and more lucrative at this stage of my life.
Woke up at 5:45 AM.
Sleep deprived. Tired.
Had my 30 minutes breakfast and shower. Check up facebook, looking for any status updates regarding my school.
Did i do that assignment? Hell yea i did. What’s the sched for today? How much much money i need to spend for today?
Things are just like that in the morning.
The sky would always looked gray at 7 AM. It’s Manila. It’s polluted.
Scorching heat is always expected. Either that or heavy pour of rain.
I’m lucky if there’s a couple of tricycles across my path. Luckier if they asked a regular fare of 7 peso instead of 12. The driver’s a bastard if he asked for 30.
The traffic jam would become apparent by the time i reached the main road. The public rides are mocking my tardiness as they passed by– ‘you should’ve come earlier, boy’. Most of the time i walked. A twenty minutes walk to reach my school.
Ferrer would took the seat at the corner. Joyce at the coldest spot of the area. I usually sat beside either of them. ‘Hello class. welcome to the first day of the rest day of your life.– mwahahaha’. *Cue for Ursula’s Poor unfortunate soul song*
New face again. New speaker. why can’t they just settle for one speaker? ‘Coz that’s the best way to discuss this subject you dumb ass. I like to answer my own question.
Lunch break. They called that caf instead of canteen. Pffft. Ateneo. lol. Place’s packed with lots of hungry freshmen. Hey. Come to think of it where all the other upper-classes? Foods are pretty decent. If not, everybody would resort to the other caf in Medical City building. Nobody eats vegetables. why bother selling it then?
People ARE different. They are better socio-economically than the rest of private schools in the Philippines. Doesn’t mean they don’t know how to be human. Some of them are the friendliest people I’ve ever seen. Kinda hard to get a feeling that you’re one of them now though.
1 PM. Most people are pretty sleepy. Humans are like animals. Observe them and you’ll know which is which. Those guys who never slept in front. They’re the bright ones. Either that or they’re possessed. Those who sit in the middle. aisles particularly. The cool one’s. Have no opinion for those who sit at the back. I sit on the back.
5 PM. I never stayed in the school for more than 15 minutes after the end of the class. Rode either a bus or a jeepney. Got tired. Fell asleep. Wake up. Had my dinner. Sleep again.
5:45AM. Woke up. the cycle continues.
My mind seems rather chaotic on my first week of med.
by: Sam Dereign
The main function of my job is to promote the hospital I work for in a favorable light. This means I write a lot of success stories about patients, interview doctors and spend all my remaining free watching YouTube videos. But don’t tell anyone about that last part.
Since we have a Diabetes Center in town, several of my stories have focused on diabetes patients. I’ve learned a lot about that disease – mainly how it’s got to be one of the most annoying diseases to have. I normally don’t associate something as serious as a disease with being a mere nuisance, but imagine having a little elf handcuffed to you always saying stuff like, “Better check your blood sugar levels,” or “Better eat a cookie or you’ll have a seizure.”
To me, having diabetes would be like having a bomb inside of you that will go off if you’re not constantly aware of your body’s status.
When I was doing a story on Meals on Wheels earlier this week, we delivered to an elderly woman with diabetes. On this particular day, she had low blood sugar and was hyperventilating and going into a panic. She asked that we get the jar of peanut butter out of her fridge; she ate a spoonful and was literally back to normal in five minutes. Then she jokingly asked me if I wanted any peanut butter. She was a sweet lady, completely disregarding her little episode and ready to be interviewed and photographed.
I was stunned at how quickly the signs of diabetes can come and go. It seems like you constantly have to be on your toes with this disease, but I suppose like anything else, once you get into a routine, maintaining it is probably not that big of a deal.
Anyway, whenever I write a story, I have to send it off to the medical expert I interviewed so that they can approve it and make any changes they see fit. (Which, by the way, goes against every journalistic instinct I learned in college. But this is marketing, a business where quotes can be changed and photos can be staged.)
On my first couple of diabetes stories, I’d get a response like, “Story looks good. Except when you’re referring to the patient, refer to them as a person with diabetes, not a diabetic.”
Um, OK.
This seemed a bit trivial to me, as I had always heard the term “diabetic” when referring to a person with diabetes, but I made the changes and took note of it for future stories.
When I was relaying my Meals on Wheels story to my co-workers in the break room, I must have been spurting out “diabetic” left and right, because when I was finished, one of them said, “You know, it’s better to call them a person with diabetes instead of a diabetic.”
This co-worker, who also has diabetes, explained to us that when you say “diabetic”, you’re defining them by their disease. Obviously, no one wants to be defined by a disease, so it made total sense to me. I mean, I poop on a daily basis, but I don’t want to be known as a fecalist.
There are just some things in our lives we don’t care to be known for.
The average lifespan of a human being is 79 years.
I’m in my 1/4 of my life’s journey now.
1/3 of human’s life is wasted in sleep.
another 1/3 for leisure.
It takes 24 years for me to be a specialized medical practitioner.
Man. i feel like i’m old for a 20 year old kid. haha.
My first month of internship in MAMC was sort of a living hell for those pediatric patients.
I was stationed there in MAMC during the dengue week. Sadly, most of the dengue patients are kids. We would usually start doing our rounds for blood extraction about 5 AM in the morning if we’re on the night duty. It’s quite depressing that these kids are among the first one to suffer.
The Pediatric wards will be filled with cries for the next 30 minutes. We will do the usual. Turns on the light switch. Tries to match the doctor’s order with the kids’ records. Asks the patient’s mother/ relative to hold his/ her kid tight. Do the pricking or veni. Then leave them be.
Some of the were sleeping when we first let them know our presence. Other kids would looked us suspiciously as we went inside the room, wondering if we would extract them next. One thing that is common from their faces is that fear, vengeful look and that suppressed anger.
We would be lucky if our patient is still asleep- even when we did our attempt to wake him/ her up. We would prick her hand, he/ her would jolt a little, then let it pass as if it were a bad dream and continued to sleep while letting us do our job.
Some were not that easy. A 10 year old patient literally slams chair toward our direction, screaming as if possessed, waking our next vict.. erm… patients nearby- making them nervous and tries to choke his own dad when the latter gripped him tightly.
But the one that still cringes my thought to this day is that 3 year old female from pedia ward in front of the nurse station. She immediately cries when she saw us. The mom holds her tight and let us do the extraction on her. What makes my heart sunk was when she uttered these words, “Ayoko! Ayoko nay! sabi mo last na yun kanina! Ayoko! Pasensya na nay! Pasensya na! Patawarin mo ako po…” (I don’t want that ma! Please don’t let them do that! You said that it would be the last time! Please forgive me! I’m sorry! Please forgive me!)
It makes me hesitate to draw her blood- then again i thought that it’s a simple pricking procedure. So i did the pricking anyway. The next 5 minutes i found her sleeping soundly. It still take some time after that to get me to finally master the art of blood extraction without hesitating though…
