Incandescence

My first death.

My first death.

I knew it would eventually happen, but I didn’t think it would be this soon. I'm not even in med proper, for goodness sake.

But I really couldn’t do anything; when we entered the ward area, they were already doing a cardiac massage and using an ambibag on the patient. My friend and I asked some nurses if the person was dying and they said that it was a normal routine thing. We were dubious (because the cardiac massage seemed so urgent), but we nodded and moved on.

After watching our nurse (whom we shadowed for the day) do nasal feeding (which I have discussed weeks ago), we went to someone’s hospital bed and helped in cleaning her forced wound. I say “forced” because the lady had a tube inserted in her body (and I mean that there was a large long tube that entered her side; the tube’s cross-sectional diameter was nearly the size of a 25 centavo coin) to help drain phlegm from her lungs. We used betadine, soaking some cotton balls in it and applying them to the area radially outward from the wound. Then we heard it.

I’ll never forget that sound in my whole life. I swear I’ll never forget it.

It was a desperate, disbelieving cry that tore at my heart and broke it into a million pieces. The four of us looked in the direction the sound was coming from and it was a woman clutching the body of the patient we saw earlier getting a cardiac massage who was screaming and crying and...

I remember the words the nurse we shadowed told us when we asked her if the patient was dead; they burrowed deep in my mind and my heart and echo in my ears as I now try and solve stoichiometry problems as practice for our Chem Departmental Exam this Saturday.

“Oo, normal na yan. Pag bago ka, iisipin mo na sana may nagawa ka pa para buhay pa siya. Pero mawawala rin iyan, nagiging normal nalang.”

When I shadowed a nurse in Ward 3, he told me that he would always remember the day a patient of his died (the first one assigned to him who died) – December 22, 2005 (well, either 22th or 24th – my memory is going bad again). He told us the same thing: the first patient will always be the one burned in one’s memory.

I keep seeing the scene play out in my mind. The woman screaming as she held the patient and the nurses going about their business like nothing life-changing had happened. Some of the patients looking on from their own beds and others just asleep or otherwise uninterested.

The four of us assigned to Ward 1, looking at it from a short distance and not being able to do anything at all.

I couldn’t have done anything. None of us could. The patient had so many diseases (we read the Clinical Abstract but couldn’t understand the doctor’s/nurse’s handwriting) and has had labored breathing for a long time already, a medical clerk told us. The patient had so many problems, some of them dating back to 1998. We just came when it was Code Red already; we were there when her life was extinguished like a finger does to a weakened flame.

The nurse told us that cardiac massage was a normal procedure and there was nothing to worry about, yet when I researched it using the internet later I found out it is used when the patient had already gone into cardiac arrest. Perhaps it is normal in this ward… I don’t know the death rate of patients in PGH. Maybe they didn’t want to scare us… we looked so young compared to the interns and medical clerks and everyone else surrounding us.

Eventually the woman stopped crying, and a nurse appeared to detach the stuff hooked up to the patient. White dividers were placed around the bed, and the nurse did her work like she’s done it a hundred times before. Maybe she has.

I didn’t even find out her name.

I don’t know why, but that seems important.

I hate this feeling of helplessness. I was nothing but a spectator to this death, which may have been normal to the veterans of PGH yet has changed the life of the woman crying because of her. I know I’m just a first year student. I know I couldn’t have done anything to help.

Yet I still hate myself for not being able to do anything.

I don’t ever want to feel this again. I don’t ever want to watch a life snuff out right before my eyes like this again, with the world having to quickly return to normal.

But I know I’ll feel this again, I’ll feel this a thousand times even as I become more learned and understand more the medical explanations behind each death, each life-threatening disease. I think my heart will still break with every death I witness, and my world will be thrust into darkness and I’ll struggle to break free so I can try again to make a better myself to try and prevent any more of this. The cycle will go on and on and on and eventually death will become familiar to me.

I hate this feeling.

But I’d rather feel it and hate it than feel nothing at all.

***

Would it had been better had I not seen it today?

No, it wouldn’t.

I would be happier, yes, but it’s better to see it now instead of pretending that the path I takes leads to many more situations where nothing more can be done, where lives just flutter away like a butterfly with wings.

I’ve been wearing a blindfold in Intarmed. Sometimes the blindfold slips down and I catch a glimpse of something yet it fixes itself and I can continue my life like nothing had happened.

I feel that right now the blindfold has been yanked off, my eyes seeing exactly what the world has in store for me.

I don’t think I want to find it and put it back over my eyes again.

***

This is for you, Nya :)

Well, and anyone who wants to see my jellyfish stuffed toy with my newly-acquired shrimp stuffed toy :)

( The cnidarian and the crustacean (?). )

***

( It's a superduck :) )

***

( And why do we play with them, subject them to stimuli that would be considered inhumane had the subjects been like us? )

***

Belated happy birthday Kel-san ^^

And advanced happy birthday to Anne, my fellow legal classmate who’s the only one older than me in the whole of Intarmed.

***

( It was a fly’s wing. )

***



Yay strawberries!!!!

Infinitely more healthy than what I normally eat (cup noodles, fastfood offerings and potato chips)!

***

Sometimes I wish you’d read my blog.

But then I think that it’s better that you don’t (to my knowledge) because you might think I’m obsessed with you and what you think of me.

I’m not.

I just wonder what you’ll think of me, comparing the me expressed with words and the me that interacts with you and making a conclusion as to who I really am.

I wonder which one you’d prefer.

***

One week to go before it's the day again, and I wonder if I'll forget about it with the numerous requirements that threaten to engulf me.

Yet I don't think I can forget, because it may not be tattooed on my skin yet it's made an indelible mark on my soul.

On Tuesday, I committed school-sanctioned murder.

The murder weapon? Formalin.

My partner-in-crime? Joan.

And death only came to our victim after we forcibly disintegrated its brain and spinal cord (using a probe) and removed most of its skin cells. It tried weakly (unintentionally) to poison us when we cut off its cheeks (where the poison was stored/secreted) but it only got a bit of Joan’s cheek.

I know it’s normal, and it’s for science (and I did learn a lot from the experience), but for some reason I still feel sorry for the frog.

There was so much blood, gushing from the holes we made and falling down on the ground. And even as we skinned it, we saw its heart beat weakly and oh, its body is so cold.

And then it’s the end and we wash up our scalpels and scissors, pouring the diluted formalin in our glass jar and there you go in, frog, and that’s that. No more eleventh hour reprieve, no more last bids for freedom.

And on Tuesday, oh dear Tuesday, it’s your muscles next. (To my knowledge, that is.)

***

Is it sadistic to derive pleasure from causing an animal pain?

Because in some weird bizarre way I enjoyed skinning our frog, enjoyed snipping the fragile threads holding the epithelial skin cells to the muscles, enjoyed seeing its muscles in all their nakedness. (Of course, I did have a cold so I couldn’t smell it – my classmates all complained about the frog’s smell.) And while we relieved our frog of its largest organ, its heart kept beating, reminding us that our specimen was still alive. And I’d feel a pang of guilt for the frog and think and then Ma’am will remind us to continue skinning and I’d pick up the scalpel and scissors again and snip snip snip I go and more of the skin ends up on the board where the frog’s pinned to. (We drove pins through its erm, paws. We all thought of “Crucifixion,” except the hind feet weren’t pinned together but separated.)

I couldn’t really hold the frog while it was alive (alive and not paralyzed), but it seemed normal (and even natural) to hold it once it stopped being able to move.

Its muscles are fascinating. They were slippery and dark red and cold to the touch and when we removed the skin we tried not to cut them (and I think we succeeded, to a point). I kept thinking to myself, I’m holding a naked muscle (not encased by skin) that isn’t cooked in my hand, a muscle still attached to a living organism. It’s fascinating, from its surprisingly tough dark skin (hard to cut even with the sharp pairs of scissors included in our dissecting kits) to its very small thumbs (the indicator of whether a frog is male or female – I think ours was male since its thumbs were a bit swollen, but one of my classmates reckons he got a pregnant frog), to its cheeks which secrete a creamy yellow poison to its weakly beating heart. And we’ve only started observing it externally. Do you know how to remove the skin of a frog stuck to its feet? You pull it off like you would a glove (although it needs more pressure).

There’s a psychological thing here, but I’m missing it by a mile.

I wonder how I’ll feel when it’s cat-dissecting time. Wait, I think the cats will be killed before we dissect them. Maybe when it’s shark-dissecting time.

***

Why is it that nothing goes right?

Or maybe everything’s just wrong.

Same banana.

Or maybe not.

***

I blush when I think of it, although I think I shouldn’t.

But it’s like an entirely new feeling now, blushing like this. It’s not because of embarrassment, nor is it because I feel sick, but…

Maybe, just maybe, I’m feeling something for someone I haven’t known for a long time now.

Or maybe I’m still sick.

***

You know those times when you just want to curl up and sleep but you can’t because propriety demands you stay awake?

Danged propriety.

***

I’m still sick and I know I’m not getting better.

And you know something? It’s all your fault.

***

I honestly think life should have save points. You know, those areas in role-playing video games where one can save before embarking on a new adventure or continuing one. Imagine saving before tests, before confessing, before mouthing off to a teacher… Then you can reset to the last saved part of your life if you don’t like the results.

Then again, I’d probably end up saving every three minutes or so. So I’ll just hover around the save areas for the rest of my life. Donk.

***

I have a new friend. She’s (I think she’s female) terribly light and rather brittle, and she can accompany me to school in my backpack. I’m terribly interested in her (at least I need to be interested) and I know I’ll learn a lot from her.

And she only cost 60 pesos (thank you UP Manila for the price cut)! Hee, it’s weird having a frog skeleton on your bed.

***

Many people tell me to not listen to her, but it's like a knife in one's heart when she reminds you that you're not like other people, that you're not biologically perfect like them.

I shouldn't listen.

But I'm required to.

***

The Math Long Test I had earlier killed me.

But at least there were no swimming cockroaches (although when we left the campus Joan and Joanne encountered a lot of them on the street) nor rain (it rained the day before) nor denial of the right to use calculators.

Or something like that.

And now it's time to study for my two departmental exams tomorrow. Donk.

***

Belated happy birthday Nya :)

***

It’s you I still dream about.

And it’s you that keeps me wanting not to wake up anymore.

Excerpt from The Beatrice Letters:

"I will love you as a shingle loves falling off a house on a windy day and striking a grumpy person across the chin, and as an oven loves malfunctioning in the middle of roasting a turkey."

And from Book 13:

"'I told you,' Count Olaf said weakly, 'I told you I'd do that one last time.'"

Talk about love, Series of Unfortunate Events style. Witty and weird and doomed and gaaaah.

I finally finished Book 13.

I don't know what to say.

I've been following the series for a long time, but I didn't expect it to end this way. The whole book seemed different from the rest. It was an anticlimax to the drama of Book 12. It was just plain weird.

I'm not sad. I'm not sad. I'm not sad.

I'm confused, but I don't know what exactly makes me confused. Many things were revealed. Others were left unexplained. The ending. Shoot.

13 books. One Unauthorized Biography. One compilation of letters.

Donk.

I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say this:
There are sheep in Book 13. >_<

***

Thank you Trebor-san for yesterday, especially letting me taste my namesake cake :)

It was really fun, the food was good, and we got to talk a lot :) :)

Enjoy Book 13 :) I hope it makes up for the horror of Math tests on your actual birthday :)

***

Ok, I want to do that survey that became popular around a week back. Jar-san, I sense you started this one ;)

( Meme/Survey time )

***

Hmmm. Apparently there is a nudist camp named PSHS. >_<

You learn something new everyday. O.o

***

Since I haven't posted anything related to Pokemon in a while, here's a picture of the pre-evolution of Chansey, Pinpuku (don't know if they'll change the name for Diamond/Pearl's US release).


Thank you Wikipedia.

It is not holding an egg. That is a stone. >_< It's just trying to mimic Chansey who has an egg in its pouch.

Cute, though. :)

***

Yay, exempted ako sa NatSci 2 exam! :) :) :)

***

November 13 = start of classes. Hmmm.

Never mind that, let's finish all the requirements for this semester first =P

***

I want to be happy. I'm trying to be happy.

But I'd rather be miserable if you're happy.

LadyMed 2006 is over, under the carpet, closed, done, done.

Let me just say that my eyes and ears have both contributed to making me mentally scarred for life.

Even my synesthesia could not save me from the scary sights...

Imagine guys wearing bikini tops. >_< And they actually look like they have breasts (I mean... you know what I mean.)!!! >_< It was creepy because during the evening gown competition I saw one of the contestant's fake boobs. >_< Not to mention all the sexual innuendoes... and the gyrations of Fingerella with her surfboard!!! >_< I know I'm 18, I've watched Brokeback Mountain not to mention certain other films with such things but... gah.

Fingerella: All my life I've wanted to get inside a woman's body...

I am seriously wondering if we (Intarmed 2013) will be as insane/perverted as the other batches with a few years below the belt. Maybe UP Med Students = insanity + perversion + intelligence (haha).

I'm happy that our talent portion was really nice though :) The remix of the Beauty and the Beast theme song was cool. :) Although I guess ours was the least sexually suggestive of all of the talent samples... wala pa kaming alam diyan eh. O.o Hahahaha. Tsaka Belle (the character we have) isn't exactly a sex kitten. Then again, all of the Disney Princesses were not sex kittens per se(except Ariel, I guess, with her magical never-getting-destroyed shell bra and Jasmine with her belly-baring outfit but still) but after tonight...

I don't think I can watch Cinderella, Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, and Aladdin without thinking perverse thoughts ever again. (Nooooo my childhood days!!!) Wala na. Mulan nalang ang papanoorin ko. Wait, crossdresser naman si Mulan. Nooooooooooooo.

Ok. Lion King na nga lang. (Noooo don't destroy that for meeeeee!!!!)

I'd like to share pictures, but I'm still waiting for someone to post them online.

It's really demoralizing when guys who dress up as girls look prettier than you, btw. :(

Well, I guess I have better hair? Demo, it doesn't count since they all wore wigs.

Ka-batch pala ng ate ko yung nanalo sa LadyMed. :) :) Ang galing nga naman niya sumayaw eh, parang en pointe na siya tapos nagfififth position pa siya pati almost grand jete at pas de deux (pero dalawa yung naglift sa kanya) :) :) Pero nakakatakot ang codename niya, Jenny Thalia. I repeat, med school looks like a long road to perversion.

At least it isn't a boring road :)

***

Life scares me when someone dances holding a sharp implement with the blade exposed.

I believe all those at a certain place at a certain time last week will agree with me on this.

From this alone it is assured that Intarmed life is going to be a series of heart attacks, day by day, week by week, and as the years fly by.

Ah well, at least it won't be boring.

***

( Reflection on something. )

***

( Who said coincidence doesn't exist? )

***

You're making me smile when I shouldn't be.

I should be scared of you, but you're too damn nice.

Thanks. :)

***

Tomorrow = Math Dept. Exam No. 2.

Please do not let me fail the honor of Pisay students everywhere (or everyone's expectations of us).

I've already failed it enough. :(

***

This is cheery. According to the program I got from watching "Walang Himala" (a play about Edsa 1 and what it has done for us) Sunday, this is my fortune (rather, kapalaran). (In fairness, may horoscope ang program.)

Aries:
Nung mapatalsik si Marcos, nagpabuntis ka sa boyfriend mo dahil tingin mo aayos ang Pilipinas. Nang mapatalsik si Erap, nagpabuntis ka uli sa boyfriend mo dahil akala mo aayos na ang Pilipinas. Ngayon galit mga anak mo sa iyo kasi bakit mo raw sila ipinganak gayong ang hirap ng buhay sa Pilipinas.

Is it even possible to be pregnant when you're not even conceived yet? (Since I was probably conceived in 1987, and Edsa was in 1986.) And I was only grade 6 when Erap was offed! >_<

I think I would have demanded marriage if I had gotten pregnant or something, though. O.o Or gotten married first. Haha.

( The rest of the cheery stuff. )

I think Capricorn got the best fortune. At least they'll meet their true love. Then they'll kill each other. Still. Better than the rest. >_<

***

Here we go again, with all these leaves and flowers whirling around us. It's like first year all over again, except we're not under the yellow and pink flowered trees anymore.

And even if there's a whole lot of cement separating us, there's still a place where no one can stop our meeting, stop our looking at each other under the starry night sky.

At least we don't have to run from the Pisay goats anymore :) They did attack John Mar's plastic in first year. =P