Bottled ※ Brain

Quiet spot at the Philippine General Hospital. The month of May has passed me by. While I charted my patients at the ward; my brother Ralph turned 30, my parents came over to visit, a friend got married, and the world moved on. I suppose I have finally adjusted to the Life in Training, a tough road that began with the acceptance that I cannot do it alone. Apart from God's strength, I am nothing.

He cried like a baby, and maybe that was what he was, in his mother's eyes. With her eyes closed, she looked like she was sleeping. On her arms and limbs were multiple bruises; they started appearing just six months ago, like random pencil blots on a skin canvas. Then came the pallor, unexplained weakness, and a feeling that something wrong was going on. She couldn't put a name into it until months after her descent into being bedridden, just around the time when her doctor, after seeing her lab tests, told her she had leukemia. The boy was 14, but he had the eyes of an old man who has been through a lot. Her cared for her mother, brought her to the hospital for intermittent sessions of blood transfusions, put up with the long queues at the Blood Bank, and even pleaded with the Social Services staff to give her free antibiotics. On Mother's Day, he was still a boy—soft wisps of hair just starting to grow on his arm pits, his voice barely beginning to crack—but already

BATANGAS is the farthest we've all been to, my batchmates and I, since residency had begun. This weekend we had our first outing at a lakeside resort, allegedly made famous by the fact that it was the venue of a celebrity's wedding—the celebrity's name escapes me. All in all, it was a welcome respite from the endless charting and patient interaction and code-ing and social work-ing—not that we minded doing those things. It's just that, at some point, we've all gotten beaten down.