Obstetrics and Gynecology: Part 1 of 2
May 29, 1998
Friday
Hello all! My 2-week stay in Laurel, Batangas ended Thursday, May 14, so it’s now back to the hospital. Now I know why the community rotation is called a ‘‘vacation” – you eat regularly, you sleep regularly, and holidays are real holidays. This doesn’t happen in the hospital.
l’m now into my 2nd week of Ob-Gyne (it’s an 8-week rotation). The Ob-Gyne schedule is a cycle of 3 days: pre-duty, duty and post-duty*. Pre-duty days are spent in the outpatient department, meaning we get to see new patients consulting for whatever ails them, or follow-up patients who have just given birth, are on current medication or maybe just had an operation. On duty days (meaning a 24-hour, 7 am-to-7 am-the-next-day duty; an overnight hospital stay without taking a bath…^ of course you have to shower before going on duty!), an intern is either assigned to the labor room, the emergency admitting section or to a ward full of patients. The labor room is where you get to assist in the great miracle of life called birth.
Post-duty days are free, meaning you can do anything you want once duty ends at 7 am. I usually spend my post-duty days sleeping, if I don’t have any errands to do. It’s hard to recover from the 24-hour supposedly-no-sleep overnight duty, but you get used to it. Ob-Gyne is one of the few departments which grants free post-duty days; most departments treat post-duty days like any other day (i.e., office hours from 8 am to 5 pm, during which you are so sleepy it’s sometimes hard to function optimally).
Right now I’m post-duty, and I’m home doing my mail. I currently have about 12 letters in my outbox waiting to be sent. Since I don’t get to go home very often, my mail piles up and gets answered in bulk (thus the late replies).
That’s all for now. Till next rotation (or hopefully another post-duty day).
Notes:
*”Post-duty” is PGH lingo; other hospitals use the term “After-duty”. “Duty” is equivalent to the American usage of “on call”, thus “post-duty” is the same as “post-call” at the hospital.
^In Filipino English, “bath” does not exclusively refer to soaking in a bathtub. Showering is also “taking a bath”. My theory here is the Filipino language only has one word for both “bath” and “shower” (the verb “ligo“, pronounced “LEE-go”) and bathtubs are not commonly used. Ligo may also mean “swim”, although the word langoy (Lah-NGOY) is also translated to “swim”.
JOINT is the Journal of INTernship, a series of email messages to family and friends (“journal subscribers”) written during my yearlong medical internship from May 1, 1998 to April 30, 1999. Internship is one of the requirements before taking the Philippine Physician Licensure Examination (also known as the Medical Boards). Journal entries were edited for clarity in January, 2020. Read more about it in the first blog post, Introducing JOINT.
