Flora

I enjoy doing weekend rounds: no out-patient clinic to rush off to, enough time to look around and actually say hi to my patients' families. I snapped these photos this morning. There's beauty in random spots of the hospital—only I don't notice it enough.

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Laconic

Last year I was required to attend the Department of Medicine ceremony that welcomed new fellows into the fold. There was naturally an introduction of sorts, which involved answering two questions forwarded to me by Paulo Vergara, the chief fellow. My replies were laconic.



I'm writing this now because, sooner or later, the new oncology fellows will have to answer the same, or even cheesier, questions. I am looking forward to working with them starting tomorrow.

If you had asked me these questions today, I'd still answer the same way, but I'd much rather say "love" than "like," and I still sleep early, preparing to hit the hay as the clock strikes 8 pm.

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Graduating oncologists

via Instagram

We’ll miss you at CI 107. To Ozzie, Crizzy, Norms, Bobby, and Papau, the clinics will never the same without you. You modeled for us compassion, humility, kindness, selflessness, academic thirst and rigor, and the right balance between stress and fun. Thanks for making my—our—first year of clinical fellowship memorable.

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Spotting F. Sionil Jose and Mavis Gallant

I finally saw F. Sionil Jose, the Filipino novelist, in his bookstore, Solidaridad, along Padre Faura Street, a stone's throw away from PGH. He was handing out books that had just been delivered to his assistants (I saw When Breath Becomes Air), telling them to which section they should be displayed.



I got Mavis Gallant's Overhead in a Balloon for Php 250!

Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at the New Yorker, wrote this about her:

Gallant was sometimes unforgiving, but also compassionate toward the characters she inhabited. I came to her as a reader years before I had any idea that I might one day know her. For a young woman, reading secondhand copies of the collections “From the Fifteenth District” and “Home Truths” was a revelation. Gallant’s characters were so interior one had the sense that they were almost trapped inside their own minds, peering outward through two circles of light. The degree of self-knowledge was painful, the understanding of the moods and motivations of others astonishing, but the moments of real connection heartbreakingly rare. There was isolation, and then there was the acceptance of isolation.

She is a "writer's writer."

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Inscribed

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Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered

Completing my census relaxes me. It requires nothing more than quick eyes, steady hands, and a computer plugged to electricity. It is best accomplished with some music. Kristin Chenoweth's version is beautiful. Do listen.

Love's the same old sad sensation
Lately, I've not slept a wink
Since this silly situation
Has me on the blink
I'm wild again, beguiled again
A simpering, whimpering child again
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I

This song has been playing in the background as I kill the afternoon writing my census, about a hundred or more pages of entries at size 10, Arial. I am "bewitched, bothered, and bewildered" at the opportunity to have taken care of this many number of patients. I don't remember everyone on the list, but I can recall most faces.

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