Jennifer Marie J. Yang, MD

We did a thing last Wednesday, February 11, 2026. The University of the Philippines College of Medicine has an annual Wellness Week that started in 2023, celebrating all the ways that students can decompress from all the stuff they have to do on the way to becoming six-star physicians. This year’s week organized by the Committee on Student Resilience and Wellness ran from February 9 to 13 included many activities including art therapy, dance workshop, mat Pilates, therapy dogs, and a battle of the bands.

Ella and I conceptualized this as “Med Hum Mondays” which would run once a month, but our initial effort in November 2025 was thwarted by inclement weather. So we decided to take a short breather (and for Ella to concentrate on studying for her exams)… and here we are at the college’s Wellness Week with a watch party + processing + reflection featuring clips from the HBO series The Pitt. The Pitt follows the goings-on in an emergency department located in a Pittsburgh hospital. I did not hear “yinz” during any of the clips, but there were references like a Steelers blanket… the lovely city that adopted me for 3 years remains close to my heart. Our watch party included doughnuts instead of popcorn, but food is food and these were my favorite type of Dunkin’ doughnut anyway. These nutty choco doughnuts have been victims of cost cutting: they used to have many more nuts.

We followed this with an early dinner celebration of multiple things: first baby steps towards more medical humanities exposure and projects with the Department of Social Medicine, and passing her endocrinology specialty boards