An ENT Postscript
January 23, 1999
Saturday
This is a postscript to the Ear-Nose-Throat blog entry.
P.S.: Jan. 22 was the sort of our informal countdown for the end of internship, as it was “’99 days for class ‘99″. I made computer-generated stickers and posters for the occasion, and have been wondering if I could do this for a living (sideline while on my year off*) – it’s having fun and making money at the same time.
Hello! I forgot to mention in my last e-mail on ENT about an interesting case we saw at the emergency room. There was this 15-year old who couldn’t close his mouth. Well, not exactly. It was more of he couldn’t put his upper and lower jaws together; his lips could still close the oral cavity. It was quite [sad and at the same time] funny, and even funnier was that he had been in this condition for 4 months already, and it all happened because he yawned too wide! Imagine, how can you live like that for 4 months! The emergency room resident tried pushing back the dislocated jaw joint back into its socket, but it was too difficult. We thought of getting X-rays and lo and behold: there was a fracture of the lower jaw. Turns out the muscle spasm from the past 4 months pulled a fragment of his lower jaw from the rest of it. And we just thought he couldn’t close his mouth. Now he has to undergo an operation to put the fragments back together, as well as put the joint back to its original position. I’ve currently got this fear of getting such a dislocation every time I yawn…
97 days to go!!!
Notes:
* By this time I had already decided that I was going to take a “year off”, meaning I was not going to start residency (specialty training) in the year 2000, i.e., immediately after graduation in 1999. It’s exactly like having a gap year between high school graduation and starting college, only later in life. I figured I “saved” study time since I only had two years of pre-medicine studies instead of the usual four, so I deserved a gap year… after all, I would still be one year “ahead of schedule”. You can read about that more in the blog entry [forthcoming] about INTARMED, the seven-year Integrated Liberal Arts-Medicine program offered by the University of the Philippines College of Medicine.
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.
