Atheista -

This won’t be your last breath, I know
I could see the tears form in your eyes
But we’ve almost made it
It will break my heart to see you go
Because we almost made it

- You’re Killing Me, Chicosci

For the past six weeks, I’ve been regularly sacrificing an entire night’s worth sleep to man my post at the Philippine General Hospital. It’s been a story of fatigue, mental anguish, twilight zone moments and stolen naps recurring every three days for four weeks running. Most students go into an entirely new setting when they’re up for a 24-hour tour of duty in the emergency room. The amount of work can be very daunting and at times, it can seem that finishing all tasks with an acceptable level of efficiency and competency is close to impossible. But I manage, we all manage. This early we’ve already figured away to circumvent challenges  to our alertness, energy level, heart strings and various bodily functions to be awake enough to triage patients, put intravenous lines, extract blood for diagnostic purposes, insert all sorts of catheters, suture nasty wounds and allay fears of nervous relatives. How do we do it? It’s part-adaptation, part-mind control and part-paradigm shift into this no-nonsense-yet-not-cold mode that we all are refining with every duty. Continue Reading »

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Though I’m still a shade under two years away from completing my medical education, the current curriculum already allows students like myself to be in the frontlines in various parts of the Philippine General Hospital. In five weeks as a clerk – that’s Learning Unit VI for those familiar with the UP College of Mecidine — I’ve rotated under the departments of Anesthesiology, Emergency Medicine and Surgery. It’s been physically-tiring as well as mentally and psychologically taxing for the most part but in the end, it’s been a rush.

Death is the great equalizer. We will eventually face it one day and no matter how much we romanticize the esoteric beliefs on life-after-death, death will continue to remain as a concrete and irreversible termination of somebody’s life. It’s like having nature remind us that the phenomenon of life was never meant to look after the welfare of the individual. It was never just about man. We die – just like everything else that is living. The difference of course is that our species have figured  out ways to challenge the natural order after years of practice and research. Continue Reading »

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Save for a few people who had more than a decade-old experience with Laser Tag, the bloggers who played in last weekend’s Lazer Tag Event at LazerXtreme were on an equal playing field. The fourteen players had no idea what the maze looked like and what the best strategy was for accumulating the most points.

Players score by making beams of laser hit blinking pads on an opposing player’s armor located on the shoulders, torso and back.   The laser is propagated from a phasor (i.e. the  laser gun). The game is made more interesting by the fact that the phasor itself is a valid target. Once a player is hit, his phasor shuts down and is rendered helpless for a few seconds. Not all hits are equal -tags made to the front of the armor carry more weight than the other sensors. Players could also score  by shooting down an opposing team’s base suspended from the arena ceiling.

There are elevated portions in the arena. The place is pitch black and the only thing that you’ll see are the blinking lights from the armor.  It’s literally a labirynth of walls, windows and ramps but it’s hard to get lost inside. You’ll almost always have two options at any single time. This makes navigating through it fairly easy. This also makes predicting the movement of other players more tedious and challenging.The pictures were taken with flash so it may seem like the arena was well lit.

THE TEAMS

The Red Team
Jayvee, Rico, AJ and Poyt

Green Team – AKA Team Visit Sagada + Jehzlau
Benj, Angel, Jeff and Jehzlau

*yes, that’s green, the room’s LIGHTING is just BLUE. hehe

Continue Reading »

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