The moment I wake up

As soon as I wake up, I am forced to pause for a few minutes every morning to reflect. Morning stiffness, joint pains and tenderness force me to keep still while ny mind is already going thru rewind of the previous day's activities and fastforward of today's plan of things to do... All the while thanking God for another day of opportunities and golden moments of making a difference in the world.

I find this arthritis inconvenient. I never like dealing with pain. I complain at the slightest discomfort.  But I console myself with phrases I use in counselling

"God won't give you anything you can't handle..."

and

"Everything happens for a reason."

With these in mind, I embrace my morning pains and I thank the Lord for allowing me to wake up to share this story.

Knowing is not enough.

Dr Antonio Dans is like IRON MAN, discussing how translational research results into policy, telling the story about how research became the success of the SinTax

SinTax decreased the number of individuals who never smoked, reducing the number of current smokers.

What do we need?
*more open space
*more walkable roads
*make healthy food readily available

The link between research and policy is advocacy.

Who are advocates?

The most important studies are inversely proportional to getting it funded.  We need to kneel, beg and scrape for each bit of funding for our research.

Dans: You don't need to be discoverers, be problem-solvers!

Introduction to Mentoring

I am taking masterals degree in health professionals education at UP NTTC-HP.  One of our subjects is mentoring for health professionals.  So I am tasked to choose trainees to mentor for a specific period of time.

Since I am on my last few months of my position as training officer, I decided to choose my incoming 4th year residents to mentor in preparation for the PBOG accreditation  of our residency training program.  Thankfully, they agreed.  Apparently, they think that I can add something to their training, value enough to meet with me for one hour every week for mentoring.

The hospital accreditation evaluates knowledge, clinical competence, surgical skills, research and attitudes.  They will look into the instructional design of the residency training program, looking into the appropriate competencies of each year level.  They will also look into the statistics, accomplishment logbooks and career portfolios of the residents.  Hence, we agreed that for our first meeting, we will have our strategic planning on what we shall tackle for the rest of our mentoring sessions.

Good luck to us!

Stop and smell the flowers

Sometimes in the hustle and bustle of our hectic lives, we lose our sense of direction and wonder if all these efforts are worth it... Let us take some time to pause, reflect, and appreciate the beauty of life.

Treatment Partner

When we do anti-retroviral (ARV) drug adherence counselling, we advice the PLHIV patient to look for that life partner to whom:

1. the patient can share the secret of one's HIV status,  
2. support the patient thru challenges encountered due to one's HIV status and
3. help remind the patient to take meds the same time everyday.

It wasn't until I started taking maintenance meds for hypertension that I truly realized the importance of the treatment partner. Am so glad that I am single and spoiled to have a mommy who takes care of me, prepares my baon everyday and reminds me to take my maintenance meds (baliktad ang mundo ngayon)... Thank you ma!

In life, everybody needs somebody to witness one's life journey.

Calm in Every Situation

I had a long day today with total hysterectomy for a VIP patient. I took my lunch at 4pm. After my driver fetched me from the hospital using our brand new crimson red Toyota Hilux, I asked to drive to buy fish and seedlings downtown.  The fish store was closing so we parked at the nearest corner, saying the sidewalk vendors that we will just take a few minutes.

I was happy with my purchase of three koi fishes and 6 baby sharks.  We were slowly turning onto the street when a karomata failed to stop and hit our right front bumper.

Ouch! That was my thought bubble at that moment... Not even a week from the car dealer and my bumper is deformed! I hadn't even started paying for the downpayments yet, nor for the insurance... Yes, this was something MaJian would describe as "ouchy" especially when the first thing the kargador blurted out was "wala koy kwarta..." I interviewed him a bit and learned that he was from Lantad, Naga, Cebu and had just travelled to work in the market area. He didn't have a singlr coin to his name. He had just started with his first cargo.

A crowd of uziseros were gathering around us, and a group of vendors were starting to turn the story around saying that it was our fault for parking in that area when it was near 6pm already when the night market was about to set up.  It was in fact still light out when we started to leave. Realizing we weren't getting anything from the errant kargador,  we extracted a promise for him to be more careful next time, took a selfie for good measure and shook hands.

Thankful that nobody was hurt in the incident (except our pride and my pocket)... Thank God!

Lesson learned: do not bring an expensive vehicle in a busy market where streets are dominated by pushcarts, and always keep calm in every situation.