Pick Five!
I was nominated for the Philippine Blog Awards (Best Commentary Blog). Please help me pick my five best entries from April 2007 to April 2008.
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2nd And 3rd? Not Bad, I guess - The Post-Mortem On The Ten Emerging Influential Blogs 2008
After weeks of dealing with the stress and challenges of clerkship, a break was definitely in order. The awarding dinner for the Ten Emerging Blogs of 2008 was definitely a welcome addition to my already cramped schedule. Though I initially had my reservations about going due to relatively inaccessible venue and the need to be up early the very next day, I figured a little affirmation wouldn’t hurt. I’ve been passionate about blogging for the past year and I was after all representing two blogs which finished in the top three. After hours of thankless slavery, a little pat on the back seems like a very inviting prospect.
Despite not much whoring and a traffic base that’s comprised mostly of wide-eyed do-it-yourself travelers who just happened to stumble upon our site via search engines, Visit Sagada made it safely to the top ten. This blog was launched January and has since emerged as the definitive resource for Sagada. The line-up is comprised of familiar faces and names - Fritz Tentativa (who also entered the short list with his personal-slash-tech-slash photography blog - Fritzified), Jeff Villafranca (owner of the blog that gets reborn every three months - Teknostik) and up-and-coming travel jock and web designer Angel Juarez. Though I would surmise that the star power of this collaboration is formidable, I’m pretty sure that Visit Sagada lost a considerable number of votes because of my undeniable and prominent association with the project. Those lost votes notwithstanding, we were still able to get to a respectable finish and we’re really grateful and honored for being included. Read more…
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Knives
My blockmates and I have been rotating as Surgery clerks for the past month. We’re counting down our final days before we all move to Internal Medicine - one of the most demanding of all rotations — so I guess it’s just fitting that I chronicle how the past weeks have been for us.
Everyday, clerks are expected to be in the Clerks’ call room by 7 AM. There’s a log book in Ward 4 where you have to sign in to prove that you really were punctual for a particular day. If you fail to sign up before a resident grabs hold of the log book, you run the risk of being marked absent for the day. During the orientation, we were told that we should be prepared to everything and anything.
They weren’t kidding. Read more…
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This Won’t Be Your Last Breath I Know
This won’t be your last breath, I know
I could see the tears form in your eyes
But we’ve almost made it
It will break my heart to see you go
Because we almost made it
- You’re Killing Me, Chicosci
For the past six weeks, I’ve been regularly sacrificing an entire night’s worth sleep to man my post at the Philippine General Hospital. It’s been a story of fatigue, mental anguish, twilight zone moments and stolen naps recurring every three days for four weeks running. Most students go into an entirely new setting when they’re up for a 24-hour tour of duty in the emergency room. The amount of work can be very daunting and at times, it can seem that finishing all tasks with an acceptable level of efficiency and competency is close to impossible. But I manage, we all manage. This early we’ve already figured away to circumvent challenges to our alertness, energy level, heart strings and various bodily functions to be awake enough to triage patients, put intravenous lines, extract blood for diagnostic purposes, insert all sorts of catheters, suture nasty wounds and allay fears of nervous relatives. How do we do it? It’s part-adaptation, part-mind control and part-paradigm shift into this no-nonsense-yet-not-cold mode that we all are refining with every duty. Read more…
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