barker channel

i have a habit of turning on the television while waiting for my jurassic computer to boot. but gone were the days where i could do multi-tasking, like watching a movie on tv and at the same time, surfing online or playing a game while talking on the phone on the side.

i used to go to the barker channel on skycable for the schedule of a movie or show that i would like to see while in front of the pc. but lately, i've noticed that i easily get dizzy doing that, turning my head left to right, coz the tv is on my left while my computer, obviously, is front of me. there were times too, that i forgot i was checking the movie schedule so i end up waiting for it to flash again on the barker channel. thus, i've been spending more and more time on the barker channel than on any other cable shows.

and now, i've learned to enjoy the barker channel. in fact, it has slowly turned into my favorite channel. i like the songs they play which are mostly instrumental music, sometimes classical, acoustic, slow, soothing songs, old songs and the like. with the barker channel, i could concentrate more on surfing online, and on updating my blog.

what's your favorite cable show or channel?

weird dream

a few days ago, i noticed a missed call from my brother on my cell phone. thinking he needed something, i returned the call. when i got to him, i asked why he called. he said he just wanted to know how i was doing.

what the?!? that was very unusual! first of all, my brother and i weren't phone buddies. we don't call one another just to say hi or wish one another a good day or something like that. it was always like, "could you pick me up?" or "where are you?" or "could you do this for me?" and not the "how are you?" or "what are you doing?" type of conversation. and second, phone calls on cellphones are very expensive for that type of call.

i probed a little further. finally, he told me the real reason for his call. he said he dreamt of me the night before. in his dream, he saw me being buried...alive. nobody knew that i was still alive inside the casket as they lowered it to the ground. when they finally realized that they made a mistake, a day had already passed. and by the time they unearthed me, i was barely alive and it was too late to save me.

it was the morbid dream that warranted that phone call. and me, being me, i told him that he was just missing me so much coz he didn't see me very often, now that he's living in another house, and i was always on duty in the hospital.

could there be any other reason or meaning for that dream?

jurassic pc

i think my computer is dying. it's getting slower and slower even after i've deleted some programs that i hadn't much use of. it's been freezing/hanging an average of 3 a day and it wasn't amusing, especially if was almost done with my blog entry.

this computer has been with me even before i started med school and that makes it 6-7 years old. it has been hacked, gotten viruses, reformatted, changed homes when i brought it to my dorm, then brought back again here at home. it has been moved from my room to another room, where it was not used for quite sometime, and i used my brother's pc which was a lot faster.

i have been holding on to this pc coz i wanna save the money to get me a laptop if and when i start my residency. but i don't think it could hold on much longer. lately, error messages have been appearing all the time, even before it finishes booting. another sign of impending death. help!!!

bear with me

In one of our duties last week, a man was brought in the ER one night due to difficulty of breathing. He was having a very severe asthma attack. Duke was our captain and we did all we could to save him. And we almost lost him that night. In fact, his respiratory muscles were so tired that for a few seconds, he just stopped breathing. Then, before he could be intubated, he started breathing again. Probably, the medications given started working or, it just wasn’t his time yet.

A few hours after that attack, he started improving. Before duke slept that night, the man was already talking, even smiling, although, he looked really exhausted. Day by day, we saw him recover. We saw what he really looked like, with eyes not bulging, nose not flared, neck vessels and muscles that weren’t too prominent. He wasn’t bad looking at all. Though there were still times he would suddenly have asthma attacks, they weren’t as bad as the time he first came in.

During one of our rounds, we asked him what he could remember the night he was brought in. We asked him if at one point, he saw a very bright light, like what others said they saw during near-death experiences. But he didn’t see anything. All he could remember was he was in the ER, gasping for every breath he could take.

On the day duke and I went back to manila, he was discharged from the hospital too, greatly improved. I wasn’t able to say goodbye to him before we left coz we were so much in a hurry.

This week, I went on duty on the same hospital, but without duke this time. On Tuesday morning, I heard a man shouting from outside the ER, asking for help. This man looked familiar and he was carrying, what looked like, a lifeless man in his arms as he entered the ER. He asked me to do anything I can to save this man, which was his father. But it was too late. The man wasn’t breathing and there was no heartbeat. But I started pumping his chest anyway and a nurse started to give him oxygen by ambu-bagging. I asked another nurse to insert an IV line but his veins were already collapsed. There was no way we could save him even if I intubate him.

As it turned out, this man gasped his last breath while on the way to the hospital that morning. He was having another severe asthma attack. And this was same man we saved a week ago, but this time, it was his time.

--------

As the attending physician, I signed my very first death certificate. Obviously, it wasn’t a nice feeling. It is something that I don’t want to be repeated ever again.

I don’t think I’m really cut out for this kind of drama. I don’t think I’d want to be a doctor anymore.

hershey's bar

eversince i could remember, i've always loved the scent of a hershey's chocolate bar. i dunno what is it about its scent, but it never fails to bring a smile on my face everytime i see and smell one. whether in a store (particularly starmart, near my former dorm), at home or anywhere there was a hershey's bar, i would always pick it up and try to inhale all the chocolatey smell until none would be left...as if that was possible.

i remember my dad used to bring us boxes of hershey's bar with almonds almost everytime he came home from a ship inspection. the four of us kids would bring 1 each to school for snack everyday until it ran out.

my eldest brother, a natural-born bully, would palpate each bar and would try to count the almonds. usually, a bar had 5 to 6 almonds but there were some bars with 7 almonds. obviously, he would get that one. and i, being the youngest, would usually get the least number of almonds. but that wasn't a problem with me. i was happy smelling the bars.

but lately, i've noticed, the bars were wrapped in foil packs unlike before. i can't smell anything now except for the big ones which retained its original packaging. kainis!

AARRGGHHHH!

yup, i am angry. i am angry because somebody who used to be very important to me, thought he could reenter my life, just like that, as if nothing happened, and with open arms at that. how insensitive a person can be!

i may have talked to him in the past for purely professional reasons, but i have never given the impression that we were friends again or could ever be friends again. i may have been polite to him, but that was only because i was brought up that way.

i may have forgiven him but i have not forgotten. coz forgetting would mean not learning the lesson. and i have definitely learned my lesson, although in a very hard way.

i may sound bitter right now but maybe because i still am. that "friendship" left a bitter taste in my heart that would take a long time to remove.

and all these blabbering was brought about by this simple sms message i received: KMUSTA?


kamustahin mo mukha mo!

crazy drivers

on my way home from the clinic, i got into a cab. the cab driver probably thought i looked kinda bored so he decided to give me a little adventure.

cruising along EDSA, the driver tried changing lanes when he saw that the lane we were in was gonna end in an island (the middle part of a highway). i dunno if he didn't see it or he ignored it, but a red toyota RAV4 was on the next lane just a little behind us. still, that didn't stop him from trying to go the next lane. when he realized the RAV4 wasn't gonna give in and let us pass first, he braked to a full stop and waited for the RAV4 to pass.

with the driver of the other car probably pissed for the near collision, the car slowed down a little making it hard for my cab to change lanes...in short, naggitgitan. this irked the cab driver and after finally changing lanes, he tried to overtake the RAV4 and quickly swerved in front of it, cutting in to his lane.

this started a small chase, with the red car behind us. at this time too, it seemed all the other vehicles were blowing their horns at us, probably because the cab was cutting in to their lanes too just so we could be ahead of the red car. by this time too, my heart was already on the floor of the taxi.

i dunno what happened but both drivers suddenly stopped the chase. maybe their heads cleared a little and saw the absurdity of it all and went on their ways. or probably, they realized they have other things more important to do than trying to kill each other, with me as their unwilling victim.

it seems i have another reason why i don't want to drive on my own. i don't want to end up like these two crazy drivers.

"Neimann Marcus" cookies

the baking itch hit me again and today, i decided to use the recipe i got from my email a couple of months back. it was the recipe of "Neimann Marcus" cookies. it was said that a lady bought the recipe from a Neimann-Marcus branch and thought that it costs only $2.50. when she got her credit card bill, she was surprised that it was $250.00! so, to get even, she decided to share the recipe with everybody.

Bengorts, to whom i forwarded the same email, had tried the recipe before and it turned out okay. so i proceeded to make the cookies, but only after Bengorts answered all my endless questions. baking cookies was another first for me just like the lasagna i made a week ago.

all the while i thought it was the true recipe. it was only a few minutes ago that i learned that it was an urban legend. oh well, i've already made the cookies and from my biased point of view, it tasted good! even my mom agreed that i did a good job... which is definitely, another biased opinion. she probably knew i would never bake again if she said something else.

and now i'm running out of recipes. i'd like to try baking brownies from scratch and not the ready-made mix often seen in groceries. i want to make food for the gods too, a personal favorite. but i have yet to find the recipe...hopefully the same recipe becky's kitchen uses.

white blazer

after straight 72 hours of hospital duty, i'm back home in front of my jurassic computer. my eyes are getting heavier by the minute, but not from lack of sleep for those 3 days. i guess i'm still not used to staying in the hospital that long. it will probably take a long time before my body adjusts to hospital life again after being sedentary for more than a year now. but i have to start somewhere.

good thing i was with duke the whole time or else i would have died from boredom at the hospital. it was a small private secondary hospital with a 15-bed capacity, just outside manila. so it's not something i would call toxic duty or toxic hospital. still, it was just the right combination to slowly prepare myself before going back to a big hospital for further training.

in those 3 days, duke and i had, sort of, adopted the way the people there talk. soon enough, they wouldn't be able to recognize that we're strangers to their town. we've met quite a few characters there too. there was a father of a patient, who by the look of his face, was hesitant to believe that we're actually physicians just because we looked young. a little assertion on our part and donning of blazers did the trick. sometimes, i'm led to believe that those white blazers hold a lot more than it actually could... such as wisdom, dignity and some added years.

there was also one grandmother, who brought her grandchild for consult, and after learning that we came from manila, was a little more receptive to what we had to say regarding her grandchild's condition. why did that small info make such a big impact on her is one sad fact of life. that kind of thinking is one reason why nothing is happening to this country.

those were just a few of the people we encountered there. and there would still be more to come. but for now, i'm satisfied with what i got, money wise...though still not enough to get this... maybe after next week's duty, i could.