Christmas Traditions.

When I was younger, I looked forward to the holidays because of two things: gifts, and the Christmas break. Now I look forward to the season for the traditions. (Although I still like gifts, ehem ehem. Hahaha.)

In 2009,  a couple of friends and I decided to have Christmas dinner at my friend Anjo's house in Alabang, and then house-hop to Miki's which was nearby. We just had dinner while Christmas songs played in the background, and had a few drinks while playing Cranium. It was a very simple celebration, but it was a wonderful night, and we thought, "Christmases should be like this, all the time."  So we did it again last year, and then this year. I hope to do this for many many years more. :)

This is how all Christmases should be. :)

Happy Birthday Phi!

I never thought I'd be a sorority girl. Now I can't imagine how my life (both during and after med school) would have been without it.

I have learned so much, and experienced so many things I never would have otherwise. I have met so many wonderful, like-minded people, and have discovered that I could have more in common with unlikely individuals than I dared imagine.

Apart from excellence, leadership, service and sisterhood (the four core values of our sorority), Phi taught me that there can be great reward for taking chances, especially when you take a chance on people.

Happy birthday Phi Lambda Delta, you are the best decision I ever made. And to my batchmates and pseudo-batchmates, I love you, you girls are awesome. :)

Food Memories

Yesterday I came across this list on my Tumblr dashboard. Nagutom ako bigla! Haha. I bookmarked it para if ever I felt like going on an LB food trip (which I haven't done since high school!) I'd know what to eat.

And then I couldn't stop thinking about the food I've missed since I left Manila. Haha. Madali akong gutumin! My blockmates and friends in med school were foodies too and our favorite activity was eating out (hence the weight gain during internship haha). So here's my own list of my med school happy food. When I get back to Manila, I'll revisit them one by one talaga!

Withdrawal!

I was surprised to realize I was having Ortho- withdrawal, what with all my complaints about the long assists at the operating room, and having to carry heavy limbs and having to go to conferences and clinics post-duty. I don't miss feeling bobo about anatomy but I really thought I was getting less stupid by the day eh hahaha! That's one of the good things about having almost no baseline knowledge haha the learning curve is really steep. Hehe.

I had my first duty in neurosurgery yesterday and although being duty on call is the bomb, I found myself getting a little envious whenever I saw the Ortho clerk and intern splinting, casting or even reading x-ray plates! I have now established that I am happiest when I'm busy and crankiest when I'm bored. People dream about retiring on an island where it is peaceful and all you do in the afternoons is sit in the patio to watch the sunset, but NOOOO. Not for this girl, although that isn't so bad once you put a really good book and an afternoon cocktail into the picture. But I suppose I'll get tired even of that after a while, so still no. Haha. So I hope to find a partner who will indulge me when I whisk him off (or leave him, whatever) to travel to parts of the world I've only imagined in books. And I don't mean Europe! I mean war zones and other places like that. Seriously, this is the reason why I want to join Doctors without Borders. (I've been thinking about it since I read Jonathan Kaplan's The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Chronicles of War and Medicine.) 

Anyhoo. I'm home and my goal for the weekend is to purge all my tiredness hahaha so that on Tuesday I can start tiring myself again! I wasn't able to go to my favorite neighborhood pub the entire week so next week it's time to make bawi! Hehe. The 4 o' clock habit resumes on Tuesday, yeahoo.

Ortho Fix*

Halfway through my orthopedics rotation, and the one thing I've learned so far is that I know essentially nothing about anatomy. I don't think I've ever been this lame in any rotation, ever. Here they don't care about whether you know the whole caboodle of drugs for MI or what to do with a child who's in active seizure (Phenobarbital IV, never diazepam! - Dr. Lukban) or how to compute for the target mean arterial pressure (MAP) in a patient with pre-eclampsia (gestational hypertension)! They just bark: what is this muscle! What happens when this nerve is cut! Why are these bones configured like this! Geez. Most days all I manage to say is "UUULP!"

So after an overly embarassing OR assist with Sir M and Sir K after which I received more homework than what I've had for an entire six months of internship, I decided to study anatomy. It makes my head hurt. Haaay boards how will I ever study for you!

But apart from feeling like a dunce all the time in the operating room, I think I like Ortho. It's way cool, big boys and their badass toys! Plus Sir K made it sound mighty appetizing when he started lamenting about having to study physics and biomechanics. I AM SUCH A DORK. Hahaha.

*Pun intended!

Learning in a Teaching Hospital

I remember doing my first intrapartal monitoring as a clerk, during my first day in Obstetrics/ first Labor Room/ Delivery Room (LR/DR) duty. The DR senior told me ok, trace your patient as she pulled the toco machine closer to me. (The toco machine checks for fetal well being by checking at the fetal heart rate, and how it reacts to uterine contractions.) Needless to say, I was stumped. I must have looked like an ass kneeling beside my patient, not knowing what to do with the probes and the strange machine in front of me, while my senior glared at me. You haven't done this before? Exasperated sigh with upward rolling of the eyes. Someone teach this clerk. I soon figured out how to do it, with a little direction from my intern, but I soon got glare after glare this time for not knowing the difference between a reassuring trace and a reactive trace.


Yesterday I got a call from my blockmate telling me that while referring to perinatology, she overheard the one we shall only refer as Perigodmother bitching about the post-duty intern at the Intensive Maternal-care Unit (IMU), who happened to be ME, because she didn't teach the new intern (who had come from another med school and just shifted in) how to do a trace. The new intern, of course, got a tongue lashing.


The nerve. The Philippine General Hospital (PGH) is a teaching/ training hospital. Although it has been accepted that for most part our learning is mostly handed down by our immediate seniors in a see one, do one, teach one fashion, it seems terribly unfair to be lashed at (or glared at) because of something you didn't know because it was something you haven't done before. We are hospital workforce, yes, but we are students too, and we're supposed to learn from you!


I'm thoroughly grateful to those residents/ fellows/ consultants who go out of their way to teach. Which is why I really liked rotating in Internal Medicine particularly in the Medical ICU (MICU) where everyone teaches and every day is filled with learning. Which is why I still smile when I recall my longest thyroidectomy assist ever, which I surmise is partly because the consultant took his sweet time teaching me the anatomy of the neck, because it's much better to look at live than in a cadaver. Which is why I liked rotating in Pediatric Neurology with Dr. Lukban and her thrice a week rounds in the wards and at the ER even though my stress levels shoot up when she's around.


Oh, and I loved observing at the operating room this morning, even though I was peering over the surgeons' heads and hands half the time. Thank you Maam Ana and Maam Helen for annotating while you were doing the surgery. You made radical hysterectomy look really cool. :)

Weekend

I'm getting used to OB time so this morning I woke up at six, remembered it was a weekend, and went back to sleep. Which I think is the best thing about weekends. I get tremendous satisfaction from thumping my alarm clock and going back under the covers hehe. Most of the day I've been in bed, shuffling between reading The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (it's a children's book, i'm still stuck in nostalgia) and going through my reading list on GoogleReader with my playlist of oldish songs in the background. 


God, lazy days are the best. I feel like a certain fat cat whose favorite days are spent sleeping and eating lasagna. 

Times Like These

The Tigasins minus Mackypoo.

Are the moments I always look forward to. 

Mentoring = ♥

I could be in a commercial

In reverse.

"I got two shades darker in just two weeks!" (Yes that's my arm, how stripey. Lawlz.)

Ah, community. What's not to love. :-|

CEBS.

When you make a profession out of hospital yaya-ship, the end of every rotation is a reason to celebrate. No matter how much you like it, or how much you say you're gonna miss it, the end is always an accomplishment. A reason to tell yourself, 'Congratulations for surviving, now that wasn't so bad, eh?' or 'Ohmygodthankyousomuchit'soveriamsohappppyyyyyyy!' And you move on to the next thing, wanting never to look back either because the experience was atrocious, or because it's was so good and the present so horrible it makes you feel depressed. But of course, the masochists we all are deep inside, we can't help but do post-mortem evaluations, and talk endlessly about our past achievements and booboos and either do a nostalgic "aww" in chorus or roll eyes (or smirk, for those who aren't gifted with very mobile EOMs) simultaneously, talking about previous experiences. And then we get these red and white forms filled with circles and suddenly you find the whole experience hard to evaluate! I know it makes it easier to collate and all but evaluating in dots is not easy! And they usually give it with the exams so when you get to it you're itching to get out of your seat and out of the room. Haay. But now I'm wishing that when I was in second year and still had these lectures alldayeveryday I had taken advantage of the comment portion to say something witty like this fourth-grader:

Yaaaawnnn. Feels weird to be home at this hour and not tired at all. And there's nothing on the internetZZZ! The matrix is dead, Facebook is boring. Even my GoogleReader is sad. What to do what to do what to do! 

Hungrrr.

I seem to have traded vanity for gluttony as my favorite sin since the start of Pedia. I swear when I leave the wards I am going on a hunger strike forrealz because having to wear a coat = having to wear clothes which actually show how fat you are. No more McDo breakfasts (Sausage and Egg McMuffin now with hashbrowns FTW!), KFC Fully Loaded Meals and Greenwich Bigtime Lunches for meeeee. And no more breakfastival! Sheeshkebab this blog is such a MISTAKE i'm getting hungrier by the second.

Anyway speaking of KFC's Fully Loaded Meal (which comes with chicken, rice, siding, mushroom soup, brownie and drink for less than 150 bucks sulit), last Sunday I had this really smart conversation with the person behind the cash register.

One piece fully loaded meal, regular Mountain Dew.

"Ma'am with mushroom soup po?"

Ha? Meron bang walang mushroom soup?

"Ay ma'am sorry po, hindi pwede, kasama po kasi talaga sa meal."

Smart. Really smart.

Anyway I have to end this now. The McDelivery person is heeeere!

Crazy Days.

I've been trying to write something about the last four crazy-ass, adrenaline-pumped days of my life but it always ends up as a big whiny post about my kawawa life as the Pedia Neuro intern with 5 patients on mannitol. DELETE! I read a few sentences and I realize, "OMG I sound like [garbled sounds]!" Not good.

It might not be obvious but I'm actually having fun in Pedia. I'm weird, IKR, I even liked my CI duty wouldjabelieve? I therefore conclude! That i like poking people with needlez! Seriously though, it's tiresome and tedious and it drives me nuts but at the end of the day I realize I like it. OMG I like kids. My world just turned upside down. :))

I gotta say, pedia internship is waaaay better than clerkship. Nevermind the fact that I now have FIFTEEN patients instead of five and my butt hardly makes sayad on the callroom chairs before I have to go out again for more needle poking and mannitol pushing. It's better. I don't know how. But it is! And I don't know how i'm supposed to finish that thought coz I can't really expound so let's talk about mannitol instead. (Sorry, it's the most ubiquitous thing in my life right now LOL.) The thing i hate about pushing mannitol (save for the fact that my thumb is now really really sore) is that I actually have to stay beside a patient's bed and listen to them or their PARENTS talk and complain and such. The thing I love about it is that I get to hear lots of funny stuff. Borderline freaky, really funny stuff. Patients are weird. IKR. Meet my patients!

1. Ang Prinsesa. Of all my patients I know her best because every four hours I have to visit her and push 200cc of mannitol, And I would dread going to her bed because she is, frankly, a HUGE pain in the ass. "Maam, gusto ko ng lugaw." "Ibili mo ako ng lugaw." "Kelan mo ba ko pakakainin? Gutom na ko uhaw pa!" "Maam gusto ko ng tubig!" And then as if on cue, tears would fall. Not moved by tears, I would stoically ignore her. That's my talent! AUTO-IGNORE! (Thank you Wilson!) I'd extract blood, and tears again. SIGH. She probably hates me, I think.And then! Monday morning, I go to her bed.

"Ma'am bakit wala ka kagabi?" In an accusing tone, IKR.
Syempre umuuwi din ako! In an equally maldita voice.
"Gusto ko ikaw lang magtuturok sa akin. Ikaw lang mag-aalaga sakin."
*Laughs* Naku eh next week aalis na ko dito, dapat magaling ka na by that time!
"Maam pwede bang sumama ka na lang samin pag-uwi? Dun ka na lang tumira sa bahay namin. Para ikaw na lang palagi magtuturok sakin. Wag ka na lang magmedicine ikaw na lang magiging personal nurse ko!"
[Speechless. Buti nalang natapos din ang 200cc.]

And then this morning.
"Ma'am bakit ngayon ka lang? Iba yung nagturok sakin kaninang umaga!"
Hindi ako duty eh.
"Alam mo bang andami nang nangyari sa buhay ko habang wala ka?"

FTW. And she goes on to say how she can now move her neck and her toes. I almost cried but then she went on to tell me she might be transferred to Rehab and she wanted to get my number so she can text me when someone has to push her meds, honestly she's starting to freak me out hahaha I couldn't push that 200cc fast enough. 


WHY AM I ALWAYS SURROUNDED BY CRAZY PEOPLE??


To be continued.

I need this.

http://www.frkncngz.com/post/583851095

Better if the picture showed someone holding a piece of chicken. It's all I'm eating now, apparently. Oh and pizza. Chicken and pizza. How healthy!

The last week's meals:

1. Sunday dinner: World Chicken's boneless chicken fillet with Mornay cheese and fettuccine alfredo
2. Monday dinner: McDonald's crispy chicken fillet
3. Tuesday lunch: Greenwich lasagna + 1 slice ultimate Greenwich Special
4. Tuesday dinner: Messhall's chicken with brown sauce
5. Wednesday lunch: Burger King's spicy chicken sandwich
6. Wednesday dinner: McDonald's crispy chicken sandwich + fries + Angel's pizza (Migz' birthday blowout!)
7. Thursday blocklunch: Greenwich lasagna + pizza AGAIN. IKR
8. Thursday dinner: Yellowcab pizza (Cheska's birthday blowout)
9. Friday lunch: KFC's fully loaded meal
10. Saturday lunch: 7-11 fried chicken
11. Saturday dinner: McDonald's crispy chicken sandwich + fries + icecream
12. Sunday lunch: KFC Zinger
13. Sunday dinner: Chowking's orange chicken

I KNOW RIGHT. A week's worth of fast food. It's so hard when all your friends are always hungry. My blockmates, my studymates, my room mates. Sigh. And all that chicken! I swear one of these days I'm gonna grow wings.

NEXT WEEK = HUNGER STRIKE! 

Bad Days

Pedia has this new "project" Read and Learn, so the pedia interns now also have to do some sort of storytelling activity in the hot, humid and cramped hallways of the Pedia OPD every morning and afternoon Mondays-Fridays. Which is a good idea in theory except most of the patients we get are still really small and we end up as free entertainment for the mothers. And the books are written in english with no filipino translations and we end up having to improvise. Still works but you lose the lyrical quality of a children's story which is really sayang.

Anyway during slow days at the OPD I browse through the kids' books and read them. And I found a book titled: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, which I believe would be GoogleMyFacebook's favorite bedtime story, had he encountered this book when he was a kid. I read the book page after page and sympathized with Alex's misfortunes -- not finding a toy in his cereal box while his brothers get these awesome freebie toys, his teacher not liking his drawing of an invisible creature, his best friend telling him 'you're just my third bestfriend now', not getting dessert in his lunchbox, uinintentionally angering his father, being forced to eat a dinner he doesn't like, etc etc etc -- wondering how his day would get better.

And then I get to the end of the book where he tells his mother "tomorrow I'm going to move to Australia!" and his mother kisses him goodnight and tells him, "Bad days happen to everyone, even in Australia." THE END! Gosh what a depressing story for a kid to listen to. But it teaches a good lesson. Life is not all sunshine and rainbows. SHIT HAPPENS. And when things go batshit crazy we just have to deal with it.

I wanted to write about my first week of internship but I keep drawing a blank and HTGOF's been nagging me to blog (pushy bitch!) so I posted a book review instead. Haha JOKE. This is my motivational blog post for the looming Pedia Wards rotation. I could just imagine my day: I read the charts and find out I have to get ABGs from all my 15 patients and after needling them to death I monitor and I get one hypotensive patient after another which leads to endless IV pushing and monitoring neglect and then someone codes and the resident screams, "sinong monitoring, bakit di mo namonitor!" And then for PM chart rounds I see orders for more blood extractions, which I painstakingly try to carry out but fail coz my hands are still trembling from all the IV pushing. And then I remember, "My FRICHMOND!" And on the way back to the callroom I bump into my RIC who tells me, to please please refer patient X to IDS and CAAP stat please. And at the end of the day all my freshness is but a distant memory, my scrubs and white pants are bloodstained, my hair looks like it hasn't been shampooed for a week, and my face is as oily as the tocino sold at the coop and as I trudge my way home I bump into my crush who is bagong ligo and mabango and I try to kill my fugly self but I won't diiiieeee. And I tell him, "Tomorrow I'm moving to Timbuktu." And we kiss (yeheessss) and he tells me "Bad (hair) days happen to everyone, even in Timbuktu." Har.

---
Due to insistent public demand I'm posting a video of the book being read after the jump. Enjoy! :]

Stalking.

I never imagined this day would come. Period. I mean I know I have stalker tendencies sometimes, coz I really like knowing stuff, but c'mon. This is like a brand new level of stalking for me. To search Facebook for someone I know only by name, open profiles one by one, assessing the likelihood that it is indeed that person -- HORRENDOUS! And this isn't even a boy thing. Or a hate thing. BO-RING!

I'm on a witch hunt for my internship blockmates. (There are two we haven't seen yet and one we saw already but stupidly forgot to ask for contact details. *Bang head on wall*) Because I really don't want to do more reliever duty  over the long weekend than absolutely necessary, I hafta find them! And because I'm so resourceful, I used my talents and tried to find them on Facebook, where I believe every person who matters can be found! 

Type name. (Click)

xx Results Found.

Looks foreign. Ignore.

Looks old. Ignore.

Hmm, possible. (Open link in new tab)

Assess.

If unsuccessful, repeat from Step1 using possible nicknames/ aliases. 

The results?

1 positive identification by direct visualization

1 probable identification

1 false positive 

1 negative identification

I hope false positive doesn't get mad. Hihi. I initially thought she was a probable so I sent her a message which goes like this:

Hi! Are you the [name] from [school]?

If not, sorry! I'm on a witch hunt here i just really need to find someone. Kindly just ignore this message please! :)

If you are, yay! Our pediatrics orientation will be later (Friday) 12:30PM at PGH. if you get this too late please drop me a message with your phone number or email address so we can fix our reliever duty schedules. Thanks!

And I still can't get over the fact that one of my blockmates doesn't have facebook! Or any social networking account! He's the ungooglable man! He exists! *Faint*

Moments Like These.

There are moments which

Pass by swiftly, and remain

Unremembered, like a dizzying dream

That ends when you wake

And there are some which define

The rest of your life, go by your eyes

Excruciatingly slow, like a slow motion stop dance

As you hold your breath

***

I wish internship would start like, NOW. The anticipation is pushing me to psychosis.

It's just work. It's just hardship. It's just tiredness.

Just like clerkship. And clerkship was fun!

Can we just get it started, so we can get it over with?

Lazy Sunday

Today I was woken by Phasefour's plea for breakfast. We woke up Hegemon, possibly interrupting his dreams of creating more empires to rule, and asked him for ideas. I have Spam, he said. And so a breakfast plan was formulated. Spam and pancakes. Phasefour and I went to our friendly neighborhood ministop and bought pancake mix, a small carton of milk, and bread, while Hegemon got his Spam and stole his roommate's strawberry jam and pancake syrup and leftover ube hopia. 30 minutes later we had this:

Our version of a continental breakfast: Spam turkey, toast, strawberry jam, blueberry pancakes, hot chocolate and.. ube hopia. Hehe. :P

I think breakfast is my favorite meal. That's weird considering I only get to eat breakfast 1-2x a week, but boyyyy does breakfast make me happy! When my mom started teaching me to cook the first thing I wanted to learn was how to make a pancake! And then how to fry an egg. And then how to make an omelette. MMM eggs. I think I know what I want for breakfast tomorrow. 

FutureMe

Today I got the shock of my life (ok fine not THE shock of my life but I was really shocked) when I logged on to my Digsby (if you don't know what this is hello HTGOF I'm talking to you it's an app that combines YM, FB chat, Twitter, Gmail and YMail  seamlessly so yes you should get it) and got this message (click on photo to enlarge)

Coz no, this guy wasn't one of my usual stalkers (for one all my previous stalkers were named Ammar or Rajid or whatever). I had forgotten, but somehow when he mentioned FutureMe.ORG  I began to remember my past self writing to my future, year 2011 self. Yuck. It was PUBLIC?? I wonder what I wrote apart from "I hope you've finished medschool." I can only imagine and it gives me the heebiejeebies. 

One other thing that's bugging me. How did this guy get my YM ID? I went to that site and contact details aren't posted, just the letters. So he Googled me? GASP! You can get my contact info by Googling Alikoy??? I am SO doing an extensive search of my name tonight. PARANOIAAAAA!

Quick Post #1

What I've learned from all these frikkin exams so far:

There are some things which feel absolutely right, even when you can't explain why. A lot of times though, you still end up being wrong. 

Nyahaha.

Gosh, how can something so wrong feel so right? :)

Vicious Cycle

5PM and I was fitfully dozing on our magical couch when I was woken up by a rustling sound on our door. Scratch scratch. Creaaaakkk. 

Hindi ka umuwi?

"Unngggh? Ungggh." I say with one eye open.

So nakaaral ka naman?

"Ungggh. UNNNGGGGH. (Sits down) Dammit I have to stop watching HIMYM. I wanna eat! Let's go to Rob."

7PM post-1000 calories I open my laptop and watch another episode. After nito I'm leaving I hafta study! I say with lots of conviction. Roommate was convinced! I unplug my FreeAgent and bring my laptop to our dining table to say my final words. And then a fairy cast a spell on my tongue and made me say words that changed my life forever. Wait i'll just check FB, super quick!....

9PM I get a text message San ka aral?  And then I read the time --9PM?! I post on our facebook thread TAMA NA FACEBOOOOK and everyone ignores me! So fine, I ignore myself too. A few minutes later I was feeling hungry again but Roommate was boycotting my cooking! I don't like cooking for myself  so I post on facebook instead Blueberry pancakes blablabla. I swear if you post anything on facebook that involves food people are going to comment, so PG! In the end I achieve my goal and Roommate agrees to eat. Reluctantly, she says. (Roll eyes)