I am not yet on vacation mode. I repeat. Not YET on vacation. Notice the emphasis on YET? Uh-huh. In a sheer twist of fate our group manages to get ourselves a week-long break for the holidays. Lucky us! While most of our colleagues back at “home” in St. Luke’s goes on with clerkship life, our group who got to be thrown at East Ave. Medical Center for the OB rotation gets a chance to have our lives back. If only there wasn’t any fighting over who gets what schedule, it would have been nicer. But moving on…

I am looking forward to seeing my friends when I get to have my holiday break from the 26th to the 1st of January. Although I know how hard it’s gonna be not to spend the holidays curled up in bed. I fuckin’ need a social life - and excuse the french for that. Life in East Ave is que horror. I’ve never spent the whole 24 hours awake just monitoring pregnant mommies-to-be ’till I got to East Ave and I’m not talking about just 20 or so patients. I guess I get to encounter almost a hundred of them in one duty day. But you know what they’re telling me is true. Even if a duty day in East Ave beats all other weight loss pills in the world, the experience and fun you’ll have spending with all these friendly faces around is an energizer that could keep you going. So bring it on!

It’s November 3. Technically our third day as Psychiatry rotators but officially our first day as one. The first two days of November were holidays so only the poor duty clerks like Pau and I had to endure the jittery moments of being alone and forgotten as Psychiatry clerks on duty.

Since I was the only person in the group who can go on Day 1 duty, I had to be within hospital premises last Sunday despite being absolutely clueless on what to do as a Psych rotator. It didn’t help that I was sick (read: febrile) the entire day. Good thing that the gods of the heavens were smiling upon me that day. I was greeted by 0 referrals and 0 ER calls for my first duty day. Pau, on the other hand was a little less lucky than I had been. At 12 midnight, I received a frantic call from her asking me to cover for her since there was an incoming Psychiatric patient and she was miles away from Manila. Que horror! Pau actually went home to Pampanga thinking she wouldn’t be called to see any referrals that night! Pau made it back to Manila on time and I believe it was a lesson to remember for all of us: never ever go home while on duty.

Our day as Psych rotators started with confusion. Among so many patients who could walk in to our little abode known as the Mood Clinic, an SS (social service) patient decides to drop by. Oh well hello there clerks! We were absolutely clueless at first but as our interview went on, it became more comfortable for us to talk to the patient about his life story.

Unlike the other medical specialties, I’ve never imagined myself as  Psychiatrist. Perhaps because I know it takes a lot of patience and determination to be one. Although I can be a very patient person, I don’t believe I possess even a quarter of determination which our esteemed Psychiatrists/preceptors have. And perhaps because I know I am a chronic patient myself. Hehe.

Three days gone. Twelve more days to go. I wonder what’s in store for us in the next few days. Not cardboard displays I hope! =)

As of 5 pm of August 19, 2009, I’m tipping the scales at 96 lbs. Yep. 4 lbs shy of being within the normal BMI limit. My friends envy me because I don’t need weight loss supplements or the best diet pills around to keep thin.  What they don’t realize is that I’m actually struggling to gain weight. I’m actually surprised at how I’m still able to keep myself from losing more pounds now that I’m in the land of retractors and sterile drapes aka “The Operating Room” (I’m rotating now in Surgery you see). The Surgery rotation is very notorious for making poor clerks like me thinner by a few pounds. Two weeks after my rotation, I’ve just lost 2 pounds and that’s already a feat since I know of a lot of clerks who lost more.

Wish me luck that I don’t lose another pound next week!

Who needs weight loss pills when there’s clerkship? Exactly a month after I started my fourth year in med school, not just a few people have pointed out how I’ve been continuously losing weight. I, myself, have noticed how my once body-hugging uniforms now hang weightlessly from my body. The last time I checked, I’m 6 lbs shy from being within the normal weight for my height. Boo!

It’s just been a month, however, and I honestly believe that I’d get the hang of things by May. Hopefully, I’d stop from losing weight then.

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I just finished my Pedia OPD/ER/Nursery rotation. I can’t believe how fast time flies. Yesterday was my last day in the nursery and it breaks my heart to leave all those cute little babies I’ve been used to seeing for the last two weeks. Taking care of sick babies is not exactly my idea of fun but babies, with their helplessness and their ignorance can kiss one’s problems away. I’d miss them!

Inasmuch as I want to make a more decent entry, I can’t rack up my brain to come up with one. It’s one of those hellish days when I feel like there’s some construction going on inside my head and there’s some endless pounding taking place. Yesterday, my allergies acted up again and I spent the whole day sneezing my brains out. I was even tempted to put some tissue up in my nose to keep mucus from dripping down my reviewers. (I know, this is some icky and nasty stuff that shouldn’t be shared at all. Hehe) What I didn’t expect though was that some genius out there actually thought of making one.

Genius huh?

I wonder if they allow sickly people like me to take an insurance like NC health insurance, though.

I’m watching a new show I discovered at TV 5, it’s called Rakista and stars Carlo Aquino, Denise Laurel and Charles Christianson among others. It’s been showing on air since August 14 every Thursday nights with reruns on Sunday afternoons. It’s been a while since I watched shows from other networks since I’ve always been glued to ABS-CBN (whether I like it or not.) Anyway, I’m off to review. My reviewers are waiting for me.

I haven’t started with the six papers I’m due to submit next week. I had spent the whole day yesterday on a date with Bee with my intention of finishing at least one paper when I get home. Of course, I failed. I ended up sleeping at around 12 am, only to wake up quite a few times throughout the night.

We already started seeing patients as soon as we finished the exams and got back to business. There’s no time for us to relax a bit and unwind. Our exam finished on a Tuesday and right the next day we were scheduled to see a patient for Gynecology. I was wrong for having concluded that we weren’t going to see any patient for that sensitive subject. Just because the subject involved a lot vaginal exposures and examinations, a whole lot of privacy to be breached and awkwardness to deal with didn’t mean that we were exempt from getting our hands dirty. In fact, I had my hands fingers devirginized that same day by I performing the first IE of my career on a 44-year old patient complaining of reddish vaginal discharge. The feeling was… weird… and that funny search term that ended up in my other blog suddenly crossed my mind. Probably that person who had the nerve to search for that “fingering” term in Google was just curious to know how it felt like to the one doing the act. LOL.

The funny part of the experience, however, ends there. I don’t see any reason why we should be happier when our patient, as we would later on conclude, only has a few more months to live. She has cancer of the cervix - a lesion that was left undiscovered and untreated earlier because she never went to see a gynecologist and have a pap smear taken.

A lot of women die of cervical cancer because the disease is discovered only when it is already in its late stages - when things are already messier and harder to treat. However, this can be prevented by having a pap smear taken regularly especially for women who are considered high risk. These are women with positive family history of cancer, women who started having sex at an early age and women who has had multiple sexual partners. Exposure to the human papilloma virus (HPV) also increases the risk of a woman from developing cervical cancer much like how exposure to asbestos predisposes an individual from having mesothelioma later in life.

This patient of ours never had her pap smear taken. I know this is not exactly the most comfortable thing to have inside you in the world, but ladies, what’s a few minutes of discomfort if it meant our life?