Musings of a Butterfly

March 16, 2021 – I woke up to my alarm at 4 o’clock in the morning, I was asleep for seven straight hours. My legs feel a bit sore and my head is throbbing a little bit. A little voice is telling me to take a day off but I reminded myself that this is the profession that I dreamed off. So I prayed and finally got the strength to get myself up. It is still day 2 of our face-to-face clinical rotation as post graduate interns, it’s too early to give up.   Let me tell you of what happened yesterday. Excited and anxious, were two emotions that I felt yesterday. I woke up 3 times before my alarm, at 12 midnight, 2AM and 3AM. I tried to get more sleep in the car but I couldn’t. Maybe my group mates felt the same because we all arrived early.    It’s almost a year since I last set foot in the hospital as part of the working force and it feels strange. Part of me is scared because I feel like I don’t know how to be part of the medical team anymore and because I’m entering a territory unfamiliar

So, I got vaccinated yesterday with the vaccine that I originally did not trust. And 19 hours after I still haven’t turned into a Titan.   Starting next week, I’ll finally be starting my face-to-face clinical duty. And as requirement of the department that I’m currently rotating in, we need to provide a negative swab test – and so I got swabbed too. On my way to getting swabbed, we received news that our department didn’t give us a go signal to get swabbed.   I thought – “this must be Divine intervention”   For the past few days, I’ve been pondering on whether I should get vaccinated with SinoVac. The said vaccine has been the center of controversies - its low efficacy in comparison to the other brands, the overpricing in the acquisition of it, the rushed approval of EUA and being a staunch anti-DDS I did not welcome the idea of getting vaccinated with the vaccine that the President has been advocating. Aside from that, I am immunocompromised with an autoimmune disease – an additional