Musings of a Butterfly

  September 23, 2021 – Papa’s 58 th birthday. In 2 years time, my Papa will be a senior citizen. I’ve been asked before who my favorite superhero was. I answered – “Batman”. Partly because I love Christian Bale and because in real life, for me, Papa is my Bruce Wayne, my very own Batman. Why Batman though? He doesn’t have any superpower unlike Superman, Wonderwoman and Green Lantern. Well, aside from being filthy rich Bruce Wayne is just a human. The fact that he is just a mere human but does everything to the best of his abilities and his resource for the sake of Gotham (and well his revenge) is what makes him my favorite. In all honesty, I couldn’t properly celebrate my father's birthday because we were waiting for the result of the recent Physician’s Licensure Examination that I took just 3 days prior. It was a 2-weekend exam and every morning of those weekends my parents would wake up at 4am and help me prepare for the exam – prepare my breakfast, my uniform, and my sn...

  April 1, 2021 – one of those where I question myself why am I in this profession. It’s Holy Thursday, a holiday and the roads are cleared off traffic. And yet I am on duty. Worse of all, it’s my mother’s birthday.   The night prior, I’ve been brooding over the thought that I have to go on duty. Maybe because I’m also guilty of not preparing for the new department. Pediatrics was my first department during clerkship so my knowledge probably is not at its best. But as I started my day, I prayed fervently that the day would go well. I told my Dad about how anxious I was and he told me that most of the times what we fear won’t occur. And with a heavy heart I left our house and went on duty.   The residents were really approachable and kind, and it gave me some sort of comfort that I somehow knew some of them. As I attended to one patient, as I was looking at the crying mother, I was reminded that I was once a pediatric patient and my parents had the same grief as the parent...

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 territ...

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 – ...

  Back in Bohol, there were 8 of us sharing one room. Me, Arnita, Rabina, Den, Ralina, Lorie, Diane and Lochelle. First time we shared the room was quite awkward I guess but I actually don’t remember how we went about it – maybe because we were too busy that time. The second time we were in Bohol though, we knew each other better. We were in different groups - Me, Loch and Den, Arnita and  Rabina, Diane and Ralina and Lorie by herself. We also did not share the same statuses. And when the lockdown dawned on us, we finally got the time to know each other better.   Prior to the lockdown, February last year, we managed to squeeze in 2 outings. One was to Sikatuna’s Mirror of the World and the other was to some beach in Panglao. If I remembered it right, it was a Sunday and I was on pre-duty status when we drove up to Sikatuna. And then we went to the beach it was a weekday but a holiday, I was from a 24 hours duty. If I remembered it correctly, I was the one who initiated bo...

  As a post graduate intern, we are expected to have a certain set of skills that we should continuously hone as we become the best doctors that we can be. One of which is to be able to present our case and defend it well. But I honestly am weak in that aspect. During my rotation in Internal Medicine we are required to endorse a case individually. But a case presentation is different from a simple reporting. I have to put it mind that I’m actually dealing with a real patient and I have to diagnose and treat the patient correctly because his life is in my hands. Aside from that, I’m in a new environment. The hospital I’m interning in is not my home hospital. All residents are new to me. The consultants are new. And most especially, my groupmates are new to me. In short, this is not my comfort zone. I am set to present on the 17th of January and have witnessed 3 of my groupmates present the week prior. They were all bombarded with questions to test their knowledge and how prepared th...

As I close my 2020 planner, I had the chance to look back from how I got the planner to how I made use of it. I’m not the planner type of person because I’m not one who’d forget upcoming events or activities. My social anxiety makes me think of planned activities beforehand over and over again. But due to peer pressure and seeing how aesthetic the planner was, I went for it. We started collecting the stickers late but somehow managed to collect enough before the end of the promo. We’d convince our fellow clerks and family members to get coffee or frappe just so we could have stickers. And I really appreciated that sort of “bayanihan” that transpired because those who don’t drink coffee would find ways to help us out by getting a different product that would qualify for a sticker. During that time also, I had extra bonding with my parents over coffee. We even had a double date with the boyfriend once. But as I’ve been saying for the past posts, 2020 has been such a roller coaster ride. ...