Gabe

there’s this great cover artist. his name’s Gabe Bondoc. and I can’t get his take on Rihanna’s “take a bow” off my mind. and i’m proud that he’s of Filipino heritage.

Helen

i got back from Davao last Saturday, October 24.We left CDO at around 6am last October 10. I was part of the eighty-eight students sent to Davao for the Psychiatric affiliation. We were the first of five batches scheduled for the exposure. We were divided into two blocks, D and H, and during our duty, we were further divided between the female and the male ward. The University of South-Eastern Philippines dormitory at barangay Obrero became our home for fourteen days and while I was there, I shared room 203 with Juwella, Aiko, Evette, Lakambini, Christine, Abigail, Renea and Bea.

My patient had Schizophrenia, undifferentiated, and i found out later on that she had been in DMC for quite a while now.

We left Davao at 5:30 in the morning of October 24 and arrived in CDO around 12:45-1:00 in the afternoon.

so that’s it for the basics. now for the meat of the meal:

After the 2-week duty, I realize that I want to be a nurse that I could go back to Davao and be a Psychiatric nurse sometime in the future. I also thought about working in London, still as a nurse, and having mama stay with me. But it all seems muddy right now. I still have the drive to go for Medicine after working as a nurse for 2years or so. I still dream of treading the oceans as a marine biologist or debating with ADCPDC as i proceed to take up Law.

Somehow, my thirst for growth and development, for self-actualization and wholeness, grew a thousand-fold! I guess it has much to do with the fact that I only saw the bigger picture in Davao. I was also able to take in the impact of love and support from the family and the relevance of functional support systems in the mental hygiene and health of an individual. Finally, I measured myself and contemplated with much scrutiny the whole of my being and the purpose of my life.

I guess the two-week exposure was a makeshift pilgrimage for me. At the end of the day, I asked myself, why shouldn’t I be a nurse?

of grades and nursing

so how am i supposed to explain this phenomenon that seems to drag on and on and on?

regulate the drops; monitor the blood pressure; count the pulse and breaths per minute; measure the temperature; document your interventions; research with the team and dicuss this topic to me thoroughly; write down your objectives and evaluate; read, summarize and react on a journal; do a drug study; and of course, for the main dish of the night, make up the patient’s care plan, and not just a care plan, something that actually works at that!

then submit these tomorrow before noon and don’t forget to review your notes because we’re going to have a quiz before we start the lecture. have a good night’s rest.

what else can i do for myself to cope for the bone cracking demands, sky shooting standards plus authoritative teachers,(who are as varied as the colors of the rainbow) aside from breaking off from family life, social interaction and personal solitude?

time management, they all say. more like elimination if you ask me. it’s either we die inside, wait it out for four years(or more) or we give mercy and love ourselves first and just shift to another college. that’s it.

what triggered this rant is the thought of how frustrating everything is at the end of the day. we spend time, energy, sweat, saliva and materials, and yet we get almost nothing in exchange. why the hell would i still stay here and why won’t any of us just get off the bandwagon? aren’t we really just working for nothing but letters and numerical figures by the end of each semester? and when i think about it, grades aren’t even real! hell, they’re not even tangible. but we go through oceans and move beyond continents just for a measly letter off the alphabet that supposedly summarizes our performance! ha! one letter to cover the entire scope of my skills and the things that i learned?

and from that grade, from that single character written down in ink, lays our future. that letter can either make or break our sanity, can either be the drug to trigger our highs or the alcohol to pull us down the drain. that small figure stands as the main chairman between father and son, daughter and mother, aunts and neices/nephews on whether they’d share an open thrapeutic relationship or not.

and from there, comes the need to fulfill expectations and the illusion that we have to redeem ourselves for the sake of our parents and our ever supportive families.

when you think about it, it’s the angst ridden teenagers like me who would still suffer in the end. and they call it a fair system. pfft.

not: i know this is actually useless because people would still associate value with the letter grades no matter how many pages of endless complaints i would fill up. still, it’s good to express one’s feelings once in a while. C:

and you think it was going to be a challenge huh?
welcome to nursing, laine.

well, at least i got a C in pharma.

yep, and you also fell short of your goal of gaining a B for your majors, now didn’t you?

…shadup.

moving on.

on the notion: let it be resolved that we abolish leaders in RLE groups, i move to support it.

you think it’s easy to do everything in our power for the good of the group while the other members are passive spectators? you think it’s okay to do nothing because the leader’s supposed to be the one to do everything??

newsflash. we’re human too. and i’m not as good as i seem to be. *evil laugh*

and might i remind youu, I’m not the leader here.

“72 ang pinaka lumpa sa tanan debaters.”

so maybe i wasn’t able to get over it. we lost the debate because we lacked matter and enough evidence to support our arguments. i know also for a fact that i AM the weakest link of the team since overall, i had the lowest speakership scores. but then again, i was able to provide some research background on the topics, my “shared sciences” argument was utilized and put into good use and like everyone out there, i did try my best..

i think i got past all that yesterday after eating my ice cream.

my depression over the regret and the self-blame only resurfaced after i browsed through my usb and found an article which could have been useful. and i never printed it.

so we finished second in the Philippine Nursing Students Association debate held last August 29-30. Capitol University is the champion for 2009.

my consolation prizes are:
[1] the juniors team (XU2) got in the finals
[2] we got to the finals without preparing as much as CU did
[3] we debated without a mentor
[4] i learned much from the experience
[5] i conformed to the theme “Peaceful and Intellectual discussions for Civic Consciousness and Awareness” (at least i think that was the team. I’ll confirm later on.)
[6] mark still thinks I’m indespensible
[7] kuya and the rest of PDC actually acknowledge my existence now! haha.

rants:
i’m beginning to dislike our team captain. she sets practices a day before and she’s so forgiving when it comes to her being absent but doesn’t extend the same scope of forgiveness to us.
i still don’t know the progress of our ward class.

PS
i might try this

December 11– the Lovely bones

anywhere but here

i hate living in this house with impaired communication lines, thick barriers plus egocentric people too caught up in their own pathetic selves.

family is a hoax. i should have died a long long time ago. but then again, i’m rotting at the moment, taking bit by bit off my sanity and sleazy existence so what’s the use of wishes when it’s here?

three more years, give or take. and i’ll be out of here. forever.

i hate you. no, i don’t care about you. starting now.

August 19 – Philippines (Manila)

yay!

from imdb:
Only two of last week’s new releases managed to hit the top five. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, Ponyo and Bandslam took sixth, ninth and thirteenth respectively. Here’s the top five:

1. District 9: $37.4 million

2. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: $22.3 million

3. The Time Traveler’s Wife: $18.6 million

4. Julie & Julia: $12 million

5. G-Force: $6.9 million

and indescribable:

“The Time Traveler’s” Wife Coming to ABC as a Series?

i wonder when it will be shown here in CDO. I’ll be waiting.

regarding my life, we’re currently preparing for Intrams and for the 2nd Philippines Nursing Students Association debate which will happen on September and this Saturday, August 29 respectively.

We trained with the Debate Circle this morning and I still need so much to improve on. But I’m working on it. I still need to read articles and laws and bills and rights and the list goes on.

We’ll be in the DR area next week. I’m excited and anxious but I’ll do my best. I’ll head out now, I have to review for a Psychiatric test tomorrow.

Oh yeah, notice how they spelled Clare’s name wrong in the icon? i did. Che, I want Henry back! :p

learning feedback diary draft

i’ve learned something valuable to me today. i surmise that i am not able to perform at my best no matter how much i push myself because some part of me has already given up; somewhere within me has already concluded that i am not enough and that i shouldn’t even try. and this is where my fear takes over because i do not want to be insufficient and i always make it a point to AT LEAST try. I’ve drawn up a defense mechanism to compensate for that fear and now i realize as i look back that indeed, i have never seen myself perform my best since gradeschool.

although it seems too dramatic in the clinical setting, the fact that we are already tackling psychiatric topics have made me stop and contemplate on the individual that i am today. after all the reflection time i’ve spent, this is the end product. bearing this is mind, there is a need for me to improve on myself but before i can, i still have to go back to take out the root that’s been holding me back.

i’ve also learned for the past two weeks, that time wasted is opportunities for growth lost. many times, my priorities weren’t really as urgent and i ended up doing things i regretted since in the end, i realized i could have used the time spent for something more productive.

what Ingrid couldn’t have..

Ingrid Carmichel 7/19

And she writhed in pain,
unable to compensate the losses
she bathed in red, consumed whole by her flaws.

He had to leave her
and all that was left of them nowhere
she wasn’t who he was–she wasn’t Clare

exist

three hours ago, i kissed my nephew goodnight.

rewind a few minutes before my mom cuddled and tickled him and prior to that, about an hour after eating dinner, there we were in my room, talking.

is existensialism embedded in the genetic code? or is faith something we imitate from our primary caregivers?

Anton voiced out a concern near the end of our conversation. he asked me with some anxiety and fear, tears staining his eyes, “tita ing, what if walay God and wala ta dire and wala ta naborn, maunsa lugar ta?” (tita ing, what if there’s no God and we weren’t here and we didn’t exist, what happens? what would we be and what would we do?)

religion is one issue i still haven’t come to terms with up until now. but since my nine year old nephew’s question, i’ve been asking urging myself to get a move on and to actually live up to my answers. but what if there is no eternity after all? and how could i have been optimistic enough to assure him that there is when i myself haven’t even established a concrete belief in either the non-existence or the existence of a higher deity? what a hypocrite.

how can i guide him to be hopeful and trusting when i myself can’t even hold up to my self-esteem and view the world with rose colored glasses? how can i help him be a better individual, able to empathize and act for change when i, the “role model” is still standing, walking, waiting on shaky ground?

he’s a smart and perceptive kid who knows how to care and how to follow rules. but i want to instill in him the faith that my parents imbued in me. i want him to have a beacon of hope for when the world becomes too much for him. i want that for him because no one deserves to feel afraid of ending up being nothing and to believe that our lives are of no significance. in the first place, our mere birth already means something, so we can’t be nothing now, can we? i need him to be whole and to be whole, he has to establish a firm belief in things that are beyond our hands, of a higher being who somehow governs our ways and how trusting in something incomprehensible can make all the difference in the world. but how will i do that if i’ve already began to strip off my wings feather by feather, long before the question was on the table?

three hours ago, i kissed my nephew goodnight.

his mom is currently out of the country, working for ten months now. his dad has another family while he juggles with my nephew’s school age and his younger son’s preschool activities. meanwhile, my nephew rallies back and forth between our house and his dad’s just to maximize family time.

look what he’s become now: midway through lethargic-psp-toting-basketball addict and a little scientist with his heart on his sleeves.

my place on his growth is crucial now. i have to hurry up before he climbs up to puberty where androgen and testosterone rule me out of his life. and i don’t want to mess this kid’s cognitive and moral development just because i passed on some morbid strain of DNA that enables him to think of life too much in the future. but what can i do? if i could, i would want to take that particular chromosome from his genetic make-up just so he could enjoy life better and be a normal kid. if it’s possible, i would like to have the gene surgically removed so he can be happy instead of ending up like his tita ing.

so every night before he sleeps, i think of all the nights an eight-year old girl once spent her nights lying on her bed, wondering about afterlife accompanied with a weird sensation in the pit of her stomach and tracing patterns on the leaves of the trees outside while her sister beside her dreams of rainy showers with dad and mud pie and beauty and the beast; and i end up angry with myself for not having been sociable enough to distract my imagination but more so for dragging a brilliant but broken nine year old kuya into my morbid labyrinth of miserable curiosity. or is it more of curious misery? pfft. i feel like Erik from the Phantom of the Opera.