my room

i'm home.

finally. after 6 long days. 6 days of no actual sense of time. the only day that matters to me anymore is sunday... the day that i hope and pray i'd be at home. in my room. confined in my own space, far far away from the hospital, from the residents and most unfortunately, my co-clerks. sometimes, your co-clerks won't be always on your side.

this afternoon, i helped marie accompany her patient to her ophthalmology referral. her patient, B.V., was a diagnosed case of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus. she was on hydroxychloroquine and one of the adverse reactions of the drug was vision problems. hence, the ophtha referral. while we were inside the ophtha examination room waiting for the resident to come. she suddenly began to complain about her groupmates. what was even more sad was that she was in tears. i felt sorry for her. i've always made it a point to myself that one should never take clerkship on a personal level. work is work and people seem to act differently during work. these are the real them that you see. pag nagkakagipitan, nakikita ang totoong pagkatao natin. it's up to you to accept who they are. i learned that today from marie even if i told her what i just wrote. honestly though, i don't think what i just said made things any easier. worse, it just made us feel more sad than we were when we started clerkship.

on my way home though, i saw some of the parents of our patients. when they saw me, they smiled(sincerely with no hint of plasticity) and said, "uwi na po kayo, doctora?". i couldn't help but give a warm smile and realize that sometimes, when you're down, a simple phrase from someone who cares will bring you back to your senses...

even if it came from a stranger...