daddy and me

I don’t know if a lot of daughters still have good relationships with their dads.  I know a lot of adults are telling the world how awful my generation has become, and how much we have grown apart from our parents.  I know for a fact that I grew up most of the time “yaya-guided” by my beloved “Ate Its” (yaya means nanny in Tagalog).  My dad worked day and night as a surgeon.  I would wake up in the morning and he’d still be asleep.  When I return from school he’d still be in the OR (operating room).  By the time he’s back I’d be asleep.  It never was an issue to me, because I knew he was just doing his job to earn money so that me and my 2 older siblings would stay in school.  Now that I have decided to follow his path, I couldn’t praise him more.  Most people would think that I have full advantage having a surgeon for a dad.  It’s partly true.  I started watching his operations when I entered 3rd year med school.  Just watched from the back, not assisting.  I started assisting during my clerkship, just last year.  He didn’t treat me like a family member but a real surgeon in training, and I thank him for that.  Now that I’m an intern, I assist him every time I go home.  The pic above this article is just one of our operations together (my dad is the one at the left).  He’d give out a snappy comments like:

“Your job is to make things easy for me, the head surgeon, not to make things worse.”

Then after the amazingly short OR, he’d treat all of us to dinner, like nothing happened.  He has taught me a lot, not just through his words but through his actions.  He lets me go with him as he makes rounds.  I smile at the fact that he sits beside the bed of his patient and holds his or her hand.   He explains  their diagnosis as simply as possible.

Whenever I feel that my mind is already so poisoned by the goings-on at my hospital, I just look at him and I’m reminded that there are still good doctors out there.

Like what one of my teachers said when I was still in med school,

“Never let reality dilute your values “.

I told my dad, “I wish I can be just as good a surgeon like you.”

His reply was simple, “I wish you would be a BETTER surgeon than me.”

Love you Papa! ^_^

22 days and counting

1 more week in rehab

1 24 hr duty left for my entire internship

2 more weeks of internal medicine

2 more final exams (pedia and OB)

1 oral exam in IM

a few hours of make-up

and I am DONE!

Time flies when you are having… FUN?  I can’t say that all of that work didn’t have moments of laughter in it, sure it did.  Especially with great blockmates like mine (aww…).

Everything nowadays is pretty benign, considering that most of my work is in the clinics, and most of the sleepless nights are because of the final exams and not because of physical work.

Me and my cousin tikoy even got to watch the annual DLSU Pops Orchestra concert!  I was a part of this group during my college time.  I am so glad that they are still doing damn well.  The only bad part about the concert is that they chose not to have any cool hosts, and so it was just like listening to song after song, without as much as a story-telling effort.  Plus they were having a lot of mic problems, which is really unfair for the singers, since most of the are probably nervous about their performance and then they end up not being heard at all! I hope they were able to fix the problem for the gala night. 

The concert was held last March 29, 2008 at the Yuchengco Theater in DLSU-Manila.  The title of the concert was “On stage Tonight”.  The show featured tracks from movies, musicals, and some TV shows.  Some of the pieces that they played were familiar to me since we also played them back when I was still there, but there were a lot of new songs as well.  I am really proud of my Pops family   Going to the concert also meant going back to DLSU-Manila… ahh.. nostalgia… DLSU Manila is still one of my favorite campuses ever.  The best times in my life were really spent there.  No doubt about it. ^^

rage against the rotation

[I decided to write this now because my mood was becoming happy again after watching 3 episodes of the Simpsons.  Good thing I remembered what happened this morning coz it needs some documentation...]

Just when I thought that I was growing to like my OB rotation, it turns around and punches me in the face.  If anger had a scale, 10 being the most anger a man can ever attain, it would have been an outright 10.

I am not the smartest person in the world, but I DO study.  We have an announced quiz every Friday, but last friday it got postponed to today.  It was all about Sterilization and Contraception, and all of the questions are supposed to come from William’s Obstetrics 22nd edition.  I got myself a copy a week before the quiz and read the whole thing.  Being a veteran quiz-taker, I knew what kind of questions residents are supposed to be asking us at intern-level.  Management, most commons, Risk factors, Complications, all in multiple choice, identification or even enumeration.

What is the objective in giving interns quizzes?  It is to assess if one has a full grasp of the topic in question, right?  As much as I wanted to memorize the whole 2 chapters I focused on the above-mentioned essentials.

Trust me when I tell you that THAT QUIZ WAS THE MOST HORRIBLE, MOST UNFAIR, and MOST NON-YIELD QUIZ EVER!

The first was matching type.  I’ve answered a lot of matching type questions but not one that looked like this:

Match the following contraceptives to the lowest possible failure rate it can incur (may repeat the letters)

1. Oral Contraceptive Pills                              A. 0.1%

2. Condoms                                                       B. 0.2%

3. Mini-pill                                                        C. 0.3%

4. Emergency Contraception                         D. <75% reduced risk

5. IUD                                                               E. 0.4%

6. Injectables                                                   F. 0.5%

7. Female Sterilization                                   G. 0.01%

8. Male Sterilization                                       H. 0.02%

9. Withdrawal method                                   I. 0.5%

WHAT KIND OF A QUIZ IS THAT?!  All that reading, and I was supposed to just memorize the percentages?!

Then it went on to a quiz type like this:

Write T if the contraceptive is contraindicated with the following conditions and F if it is not. (WHA?!)

Heart Disease

__ Condom

__ IUD

__ OCPs

__ Minipill

This went on for conditions such as heavy smoker, thyroid disease, etc.  Although it seemed better, still one could have written a far more superior quiz.  I am not angry because I know I am going to get low grades, but because I studied so hard and had to get such an inferior line of questioning.

The worst part about it is when the resident who gave the exam went up to one of my co-interns and said:

“Didn’t I tell you guys to study on the lowest failure rates? Didn’t you tell your co-interns?”

Ahh… so apparently she thought we would get good grades because she leaked the question out.  Well, for one, that intern didn’t tell me that the questions would be that way, and two, I study not just for quizzes but also for future care for my patients.

Again, another kind of teacher that doesn’t know how to teach.  Another teacher I refuse to become.  You teach for your students to learn, is that so hard?

And that is why I was so mad starting from 9 am this morning… As I stormed out of the conference room, I could feel the confusion and anger of most of my cointerns as well.  As I made my daily rounds that morning, I saw one of my surgery residents making rounds as well.  She smiled at me, and I immediately begged her to take me back to Surgery…

I didn’t come all the way to the UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES to take such exams that don’t even help me with the future boards…

Speaking of quality of education in UP, we also are students in charge of patients in the Gyne department right?  Well, I heard from one of my cointerns that they don’t even let you scrub in in the surgery, but they just call on you to pass the specimen to the histopathology department…

WHERE IS THE DAMN LEARNING?!

I probably got to learn more about OB in DLSU than this… I got more hands-on in the surgeries…

I try to calm myself by remembering what my Dad said… You don’t expect them to teach you directly, you learn by yourself, read by yourself, teach yourself…

Fantastic… maybe I should have been home-schooled instead…

Great quiz Ma’am, looking forward to the next quizzes…

6  WEEKS TO GO BEFORE END OF OB-GYN ROTATION.

post duty hang over

Good morning everybody… It’s been 26 minutes since I got home from duty. I already changed into my sleepy clothes for a well deserved morning sleep after a 24 hour duty. Compared to my last OBAS (Obstetrics Admitting Section) duty, this duty was particularly more toxic, because of the constant influx of patients. But now that it’s the second time around, I wasn’t as scared as I used to be, and because I knew tomorrow there you would be no endorsements of new patients, I gladly became the intern in charge of patients with no study pressures for the next day Despite the non-stop action from all the tasks we had to do, the most fun part of the duty was our ice cream time. One of the patients who gave birth treated all of us to a bucket of mango graham ice cream… Dee-lish!

shifting dullness

Shifting dullness… It’s actually a physical finding that pertains to ascites, or to put it more plainly it’s like having abnormally large amounts of fluid in your tummy.  But when you are talking intern-lingo, when we actually say “I am experiencing shifting dullness right now.”, we mean we are in the state of adjusting to a new rotation or environment.  Right now that’s exactly what I am feeling… SHIFTING DULLNESS.  As I probably described in my earlier write-ups, medical clerks, interns and even residents have a schedule of departments to rotate in.  Like right now, I am in my second day in the OB-GYN rotation.  I am going to staying in this rotation for 2 whole months, and then later I am going to shift to Orthopedics.  That’s where we got the term shifting, I guess.  And when I personally come into a new rotation, I become this robot that kinda acts slow, still trying to get into the natural speed of things, trying to remember what I learned last year in clerkship, etcetera etcetera.  If you’re lucky, like me right now, you’ll enter a new department on a post duty status, meaning you don’t go on 24 hour duty on your first day, and you don’t have much work to be done, so you kind of get the chance to ease your way in.  But if you’re UNlucky, you enter the rotation as a duty intern, where you spend your first 24 hours running around still trying to recall, “What labs do I have to request for again?”.  It’s like riding a bike again after years of not getting on one.  You know what to do, and you’ve done it before, it’s just taking the time to seep it’s way into your system again.  Usually it takes a week for shifting dullness to subside, but letting it get to you makes you look lost.  And so now you know exactly how I feel at this particular moment.  Tomorrow is my 3rd day in OB-GYN, and it will be my first duty in the OB Admitting Section, where I get to see people frantically wanting to get in coz their water bags broke.  Please pray that my shifting dullness is cured by tomorrow.  And as extra precaution, I am going to be reviewing from this point forward.

Doctor Beans, signing out.