Finally Out of Surgery Wards
December 26, 1998
Saturday
Merry Christmas and a Blessed New Year!
I had my last duty as a Surgery ward intern on Christmas Eve. No more PACU monitoring, at least for now! (PACU – post-anesthesia care unit; monitoring – checking vital signs). The best times of the past rotation at the surgery wards was when I got pulled out of duty to go Christmas caroling… wait a minute… what was that? Caroling?
The Department of Surgery has a choir supposedly composed of residents. However, there aren’t enough non-busy residents who sing (meaning, either the residents cannot sing or have too much to do and cannot squeeze caroling into their busy schedules) so the choirmaster (a resident himself, but in 4th year; there are 5 years in a surgery residency program) needs interns to beef up his choir. In other words, it’s supposed to be a residents’ choir with guest interns. At the rate we were going, it looked like an interns’ choir with guest residents.
Anyway, we went caroling about 2-3x per week for about 3 weeks. If a caroling day falls on a duty day, some lucky people get to leave duty to go caroling (i.e., “pulled out” from duty). I was lucky twice. It also helps if you know how to sing and/or play the piano (ahem, ahem). The surgery choir earned P58,000, most of which will go to the New Year’s Eve party fund. P5,000 was allotted for carolers’ lunch out at Don Henrico’s (an Italian restaurant with superb food)* last Wednesday, December 23, 1998.
The department has a New Year’s Eve party since it will be “code white”, meaning everyone has to be on duty. Holds true for residents and interns. Will write about this in a future issue. It promises to be exciting…
Notes:
* Apparently I liked Don Henrico’s food. I probably wouldn’t describe it as “superb” now – but it was at least decent Italian-American pasta and pizza.
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.
