In The Thick Of It: Blue Christmas

"Never regret anything that has happened in your life, it cannot be changed, undone or forgotten so take it as a lesson learned and move on." - Unknown

I cannot explain what my insides feel like when Christmas is looming large at my doorstep. With certain responsibility falling on my shoulder, I feel helpless being helpless. Yes, at some point in our lives we do stupid things and make stupid decisions as well. Crying over spilled milk will do no help nor lessen the burden you carry. Things may be that sweet at a glance. Your whole being is gravitated towards a rare gem that has a tongue of honey; and you are cast under its spell. Until you realize you suddenly snapped. Then go figure why things do not seem to be what it seemed to be.

I don't get stressed about things that other people might. What I do let get under my skin are things like deadlines, bills, unnecessary throw-aways, wasted efforts, cunning minds taking advantage of the gullible, and  even Christmas traditions, among other things, that fall heavily on my mind.  But does it make any difference if December happens to be a Christmas month? Yes and no. It does because this month happens to be my tightest, and it falls on Christmas. No because Christmas has to pass anyway before we welcome another year filled with hope. Eye staring down at the negatives helplessly tore at me and made me wish away each passing day, and oh yes even on Christmas day.

Seriously though, I said way back when I started this endeavor, that I was excited to see what I would become at the end of this road and how would the experience change me. I hoped then that it would be for the better. As long as I can accept the lessons that life is throwing my way, and learn from them ... truly learn from them, I can say with certainty that this is for the better. Lessons learned indeed are a gem that adds to the pearl of wisdom drawn from the experience of life's adversity. I hope peace on earth will still have a chance. Merry Christmas everyone!

She's A Good Witch After All

"Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will." ~Vernon Howard

I bet critics of this piece of monumental blooper  lashed out at its author mercilessly, and rolled onto floor in laughter. This prized find may have rotten down the sink, but it sends me up into a convulsive state everytime it reminds me of my own back in high school. I was studying then  in a barangay high school located in a hilly part of Sagay City. I would say, I'd been an average student since freshman high - not necessarily existing in class if not prompted, nor a bottom-dweller in every quiz. I also dread Fridays then. I have to be absent again to babysit my three-year old niece. Her parents are away the whole day going about with their wares. They are into buy and sell. (I don't have any choice - or I get stuck in my parents' home - mind and body stunted under the tall rows of sugarcane. So goes my excuse letter to my class adviser, " Please excuse me for making absent in your class because I care my niece today."

The following Monday, our adviser would do the roll call  and stop at me like ten minutes 'applauding'  my brand of English on top of my Friday absenteeism. We call her "aswang na bardot" which means slutty witch, obviously because she puts on thick and red lipstick and bathes in cheap perfume. The appearance is no more than a piece of stick with bulging eyes that could  horrify Linda Blair in her fiercest. Mind you, she's one of the most confident English speakers I've ever met  punctuated with her bizarre accent. Her mannerism in class is ridiculous too. She would flake off her dead skin cells wherever her hand touches, while her mouth froths tirelessly with her boundless vocabulary. So nobody really takes her seriously that's why she remains a spinster.

While most of us students did not bother to give her a damn other than her being a circus fixture, I guess I somehow gained a few from her wit. She would yell on top of her lungs if you say, "roses blooms". Or she would curse at the hopeless sets of genes you inherited from your ancestors for saying " she has a nice pair of eyeglass".  Of course we would go on to finish high school, and some of my lucky classmates have gone on to become nurses or engineers, until we heard that she had retired already. I thought I admired her secretly for her passion to teach us the right English, though no one really showed her she's being appreciated. I didn't get a chance though, I tell you I was so shy to even recite in class much more to say thank you to her personally or some eyelashes bat collectively.

Just I remember her. Wherever she is now, this is my way of saying thank you to her. 'Cause I got nothing to write and my mind is empty. Trash bin stinks. Mind in wanderlust. Just a little laugh at this piece of genius brushes aside my worries of an empty fridge. What the heck! Christmas is drawing near and nearer, still it floats in the air haha! I hope my landlord doesn't freak out if I've got none for my dues. Merry Christmas in advance!

First Salvo Is Fun!

"People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built." - Eleanor Roosevelt

I don't go crazy over  horror stories much less if it begs your apology for visual incapacity. What is required of you is just a pair of attentive perfectly working eardrums all to get your time tricked into passing.  The room is no mundane setting.You have to submit to proper etiquette and compassionate instinct.The storyteller is gushing with hair-raising tales of the paranormal. Linda Blair and Emily Rose figure prominently at the ghostly scenario, not the fictional superstars but the 'made-up' stories and characters he insists to be real-life experiences. His audience is keen to add life to the deathly plot by agreeing to the script.  Though no loud reactions. Only a couple is in tune,  in fact there is three. And that makes them four together.

While three are visibly active, the fourth person is the real protagonist but hardly exists yet taking command of every scenario. Everytime  mucus inundates his airway and prompts wheezing, he takes  the attention of all, and their touch. The reciter of tales who loves spotlight on him quickly picks up an undersized pair of plastic gloves to lend a hand. And we are back from virtual world. Nurse Jennifer is quick to fix the machine and the tubings. She will be extracting mucus secretion from the patient to clear his airway. We are pretty quick too. We tilt the head and assist in the method. We extracted a bounty. Breathing suddenly normalized. The patient has been comatose since one week. A case of intracerebral hemorrhage with severe hypertension. He is a 66-year old  African. And the bad news is - the prognosis is not good.

It was my first OJT and my assignment was ICU. Nerves was all over me. I was not alone though. Benjie and I were picked to assist at the ICU. He is a PT grad so more or less he is inclined to doing this and stuff. After taking down notes on patient's profile and medical history, we proceeded to don our gloves and plastic apron. The patient is being fed via nasogastric tube and so we had to assist in his feeding. Turning the patient every two hours is also necessary to avoid bedsores and skin ulcer. The patient is on foley catheter so we had to drain his urine every now and then. We also did oral care on him to contain the stench coming from his oral cavity. His BP has been consistently abnormal and so cardiac arrest could be imminent. He has to be under our careful watch. Other than that everything is pretty normal and peaceful in the ICU.

The yawning gap in between administering care for a comatose patient could steal one's sanity away, says Nurse Jen. Gladly, we came that day to her aid. So she won't be humming around appeasing those naughty unseen gliding over the room in a cold breeze. Nurse Jen has had company that day. To shun away  lulling moments  in the ICU, Benjie had spooky stories dug up from his footlocker. Deathly tales, exorcisms, nightmares and creepy adventures made good fodder for the three of us. There was no escaping from pinning your auditory cells to the convincingly credible storytelling of the "cold compress king". Did I say he used up more than a dozen pairs of gloves for his cold compress regimen on his inert listener? :-)

If there was an award  for tibial stamina we could have run away with it too. And surely the fun diminishes when you feel some grumbling within. And this is what Benjie has been blabbering about - tons of pizza that he ordered that made my midsection even loudly complaining. Little did we know, down a ceiling below, some of our co-trainees were already on a frenzy over a huge pizza and salad that Chris had ordered for the batch. He happened to be the birthday boy (it was announced at school) and so he had to oblige us. (Poor Chris! :-)) Benjie surely had eavesdropped on the activities below. He made a trip quite a number of times down. (He must have bullied reluctant Chris into obliging for a pizza treat :-)) Of course there's no way we could miss out on the 'plunder'. We eventually found ourselves sprinting down the stairs.

Now I won't have to weep with envy everytime I see a flatter belly. Pizza is the single most atrociously irresistible reward you could possibly get for enduring the day. The  smell and sight of it is going to make every carb skeptic crawl out of the woodwork and ignore a beeline for a first grab of a bigger slice, pepperoni at that. Apart from the pizza, salad and cookies, Jasmine too had brought a basin of pancit  with matching white loaves. There you go a food trip in the hospital. Haggard faces suddenly lightened up. A co-trainee recounts how his boy patient is practicing high jump in his bed. Another, his patient touring around the hospital with  the entire socceer team with him, you would think there is a football match in the lobby. Ours though is not exactly a happy one.

At the onset, everyone thought our OJT will be an entirely nerve-wracking experience. On the first foray, we were overwhelmed with nerves and pressure, but it wouldn't take long before we realized that the experience helped boost our morale and self-worth. And yes we had fun too. Patients are people with varying needs. A little tap on their back and reassurance that everything will be okay already lights up their faces, and it does contribute to their recovery. True healthcare providers don't just focus on the patient's physical well-being, they are bound to go the extra mile too. Expertise and science alone do not at all complement the healing of the infirm without compassion. After all, homo sapiens is not only made up of flesh and blood, there is more to what our eyes can't see. Good luck to all Batch Four!