Im baaaaaack!!!!!!!!!!!
In Davao City, that is. Ugh.. alright.. for two years now. I came back for medical school. I was bred here. After graduation, I left home to try my luck in Manila. and boy! HOW I LOVED THE FREEDOM! the anonymity, the people who couldn't care less with what you do with your own life, my own apartment (alright! I had a flatmate, but still I owned the fridge, and the DVD, and the TV, and the gas range). aaaahh.. living alone was a dream... for about a year or so... and then suddenly the loneliness crept in. Its true, what they say, if it is not really you, it won't stick. So one by one, all the drinking, the smoking, the weekend-bank-account-hemorrhaging-get-aways, they all floated away. Suddenly, I was done with it all. And all I could ever think of was getting home and persuing my lifelong dream -medicine.
So after 5 years of searching for myself, I found myself enrolling into medical school. Thank God my parents and siblings are still willing to finance everything despite getting disappointed year after year my negativity and lame excuses ('im way too old', 'my brains cells died a long time ago', 'its too expensive', 'i'd rather work abroad').
Now, one and half year of medical school and 10 lbs heavier, I find that it is not as I thought it would be. Yes, I expected it to be hard but not as hard as it really is. What I did not expect the most is that I'd find myself struggling with memorizing facts. Back in college, I was insecure with my intelligence because I had always thought of myself as a "parrot" student - one who memorizes stuff without understanding them. I never had a hard time memorizing chapters and chapters of facts. What I found hard back then were subjects that would make me analyze things like Philosophy and English, (two-page-single-spaced-reflection-paper-on-Macbeth, seriously, who reads those these days???). I used to be able to memorize a chapter on anatomy in just one reading a night before a long exam, never revisit those pages, and still get everything right in the term exams. Now I find myself reading one page again and again just to be able to memorize facts. It must be from all the coffee over the last 6 years.
Anyway, people keep telling me to embrace medical life like there is no other life for me. Up to now, I refused to accept this. I have seen other lifestyles that are actually compatible with life, and friends, and family, and eight-hour-sleep-a-day. And they are all very fulfilling. During my first year, I keep thinking I could always go back if medicine does not work. But now, on my 2nd year, with my parents two hundred thousand pesos poorer, I am beginning to think there is nothing for me to return back to. Medicine is all I've got. So I could either reactivate my neurons and embrace the lifestyle or sink. And I choose the later. But not without a fight.
This blog is my way of rebelling against medicine. I refuse to accept the fact that medicine will hinder me from my first love - traveling and living life. And since I currently on allowance, I will limit myself to travelling and rediscovering the city that I have come to call home for the past 17 years - Davao City.
