I just had to write about this.  It just feels vertiginous to me.

   Former President Cory Aquino and Future-Ex-First Lady Susan Roces (with the Estradas and the Marcoses lurking behind her) marching to Batasan to call for PGMA's resignation, thus fouling up the traffic and undoubtedly wreaking havoc with the economy in the process.  That is, undoubtedly, the weirdest alliance that I have ever seen.  It's surreal.

   I don't think it will work. Certainly PGMA doesn't think so, because she--and her allies--presumably still blocked the impeachment process, knowingly risking such a mass uprising instead of going through her "day in court".   She must be confident that so many unsuccessful rallies within such a short period means that "People Power" is losing its "Power". 

   I wonder what will happen if it suddenly turns out that she's wrong.                  

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   Sorry I haven't been updating lately.  A lot of my relatives just arrived from the province, and I recently got hooked on role-playing at a fantastic Star Wars site.  Role-playing?  Star Wars?  

   Yup.  I got a short-haired Nicole Kidman as my avatar (from the movie Birth), and gave her a history as a Jedi Knight.  The admins at the site even made me a signature:

   I don't know about you, but I think it's pretty cool.  They even gave me a purple lightsaber.

   So why am I indulging in all this kidstuff?

   Because pre-residency is only a few short weeks away.  I can't believe it.  Time flies.  It really flies.  It wasn't so long ago that I was taking the Physician Licensure exams, and yet just yesterday, the August 2005 results already came out.  I would be depressed if it weren't for the fact that a lot of my old friends either passed or topped the country.  I'm so proud.    

   *Sigh* Anyway...

   Is the Washington Manual of Therapeutics enough to survive pre-residency?  My friend is reading just the Medicine blue book.  Both of us are sick to death of Harrison.  That's just for now, but I think we're both going to end up rereading Harrison anyway.  I'll hurdle that one when I need to.

   I guess the real reason why my thoughts are all over the place today is because I'm sad that I won't be seeing Tomato for four days.  He's on his way to the airport for a flight out to Davao even as I'm typing this.  It's an official trip, and of course I've given him my full support, but that doesn't mean that I'm happy about it.  I've gotten used to seeing him each and every day that I feel lost.  I've told him to text me often and send lots of MMS's with voice attachments, but they won't make up for the real thing.

It's just four days, Potato, just four days...

---

Okay, here's another instance.  And I really know the person this time, because it happened to my Dad. 

He was just 29 years old at the time, and an overworked surgical resident.  She and my mom had been married for only two years.  I was just 1 year old, and my brother hadn't even born. 

He had attended--and emceed--a big party the night before.  Before the party was through, his throat was extremely sore, and not just from shouting on the microphone. 

The next day, he woke up with a high temperature.  Mom kept trying to convince him not to go on duty that day, but Dad refused.  It was 7 in the morning, and he was just in the process of bending down to put on his socks when he suddenly went rigid.

Mom says that he then collapsed bonelessly back on the bed and started convulsing.  His eyes had rolled back on their sockets, and he was foaming at the mouth.  Mom barely had time to react before he abruptly quit breathing.

Mom was already a licensed nurse at the time, but the sight of Dad lying there lifelessly made her go into hysterics.  Fortunately, her sister and dad's brother were staying with them at the time, so they heard her and ran to help.  My uncle helped my Mom start CPR, while my aunt hollered for the neighbors.  Two came, a woman dressed in a negligee and a man dressed in boxer shorts and a towel.  Mom herself was dressed in pajama bottoms and an inside-out shirt.  Between themselves, they managed to carry my dad from the second-floor apartment down to the street, where they miraculously flagged down a taxi within seconds. 

It was extremely fortunate that the hospital where Dad trained as a resident at the time was only about 10 minutes away, and that it specialized in cases like his.  However, 10 minutes is still a long time for the brain to go without air.  After 4 minutes, neurons already start to die. Mom said that she saw Dad's feet turning blue from lack of oxygen as they sped to the hospital.

When they arrived at the hospital, Mom realized that she'd forgotten to bring money to pay for the cab.  But her neighbors shooed her off and said they'd take care of it.  How they managed it without carrying anything and wearing nightclothes, Mom never found out, but she is extremely grateful to them up to this day.

The residents and consultants at the hospital were flabbergasted when they recognized the patient.  Immediately, they started CPR and did everything imaginable they could think of.  In fact, they continued pumping way past the time that they usually stop with other patients. 

When they finally revived him, the older consultants shook their heads and predicted catastrophic brain damage.  They pitied my Mom, a young mother with a baby who was just starting her life with her husband. 

Yet, my Dad was awake, alert, extubated, and talking within 48 hours.  He was released from the hospital within a few days.  And he topped the GS national boards with 2 months.  Everyone hailed his recovery a miracle.

What's the point of this story? 

At the point when he was supposedly clinically dead (which was about thirty minutes)  Dad said that he felt himself going down a tunnel with a light at the end (sounds familiar?).  And then, he spent the time floating among beautiful fluffy clouds, feeling very blissful and content. 

Was all that just a dream?  Just a figment of his imagination?  Yet, he was clinically dead at the time, which means that his heart wasn't pumping, his blood wasn't flowing, and his brain certainly wasn't working.  For thirty minutes.

I think that would be harder to explain with nothing more than Science and Medicine.

---

   I have a friend who frequently leaves her body.

   She doesn't like it, but she can't control it either.

   Sometimes, she just wakes up in the middle of the night for no particular reason, then realizes that she's looking at the ceiling from a distance of about six inches.  Then she looks down at the bed and realizes that her body is still there. 

   One of her most frightening stories was the time she woke up to find herself still lying down on her bed, but just beside her corporeal body.  It was as if her soul had moved in sleep, but her body had failed to follow.  The scary thing was, she could see a dark shadow on one corner of the room, a shadow that felt like an evil, living presence that was staring at her.  My friend tried to scream, or move, or wake up, but she was frozen in place.   As a last resort, she began reciting the Lord's Prayer over and over again.  Apparently, it worked, because before the shadow could reach her, she woke up.  However, she heard it whisper something to her just before it disappeared:  "I'll get you someday."

  Her stories have always left her friends concerned for her welfare.  We've always believed that her experiences were more than just nightmares or flights of the imagination.  As far as we know, she's a rational person and a doctor like us, and not usually given to superstition.  But just to be safe (especially after we heard that last story), we told her never to sleep alone, or never to lock the door, so someone could always be on hand to wake her up.  But she's a stubborn girl.   

   Now, psychologists in the University of Manchester are researching the idea that OOBE's or Out of Body Experiences are all just in the mind.  According to David Wilde, the researcher running the project, said, "There are several theories as to why people have OBEs. A common link between them is the idea that in certain circumstances the brain somehow loses touch with sensory information coming in from the body. This triggers a series of psychological mechanisms which can lead to someone having an OBE.

   So does this mean that my friend has just been suffering from some sort of neurological dysfunction all these years?  How then, can it be explained, that she sometimes knew events which happened while she was supposedly asleep?  How was it possible that she saw things, or heard conversations which were happening elsewhere in the house?  I don't think that you can explain such occurrences in a wholly scientific way.  Or if it can be explained, I don't think it would be as simple as the brain just losing touch with reality.

---

   When I was in high school, my cousins teased me that I was fat.   They even called me and my brother "The Two Little Pigs".  Consequently, I spent my days hopping from one diet to another (the one that worked best on me was the no-rice diet), joining all sorts of sports despite rigorous CAT training (basketball, badminton, and pingpong), and even working out furiously on the stationary bicycle for up to an hour each day.  My parents and friends told me that my figure was fine and in fact a little skinny, but I didn't believe them.  I was almost suffering from a mild form of anorexia nervosa at the time.  I'd look at the mirror and see this pudgy girl.

   Yet, I weighed just 98 pounds, with a waistline of 24 inches.  Ah, the good old days, only I didn't realize it at the time. 

   I was like that all the way through college.  And then, just before I entered Med school, romance struck.

   I'd always credited my weight gain to all the coffee and junkfood that I obsessively consumed during my endless nights of studying, but now I realized that being involved with someone at the time also contributed.  Current evidence supports that relationships can have this effect.  A Cornell University study of 1,980 married people found that women are more prone to gaining weight during the first year of marriage than men.

   My ex used to be fit too, but somehow, once we got together, our diets fell apart.  It didn't help that he was huge with a matching appetite; when he was in his early teens, he got a hairsbreadth away from acquiring Diabetes Mellitus type 2 because of his weight and unhealthy eating habits.  His doctor put him on a healthy kind of crash diet and ordered him to work out.  A lot. That way, he was able to control his weight for several years.   However, dining out, fastfood, and spare hours reserved for study changed all that, for us both. 

   There was another factor.  In many long-term relationships, the motivation to stay thin fades, explains Edward Abramson, a professor of psychology at California State University-Chico and the author of "Marriage Made Me Fat." Part of the attitude shift is a waning interest in conforming to a strict beauty ideal that the male species is supposedly drawn to -- a woman in a relationship has already found a partner to love her. (excerpts from IS LOVE MAKING YOU FAT?)

   We've always said that love is blind--that if you really love someone, factors such as shape and size shouldn't matter.  But this doesn't give us the license to let ourselves go just because we think that our partners shouldn't care.  (I still hear from him every now and then, and he supposedly lost all that excess weight again.  Figures.)

    This is how I look like when I'm simultaneously updating my blogs (8), browsing my friends' blogs, trying to keep up with the 10 RPG's (Harry Potter, Star Wars, and miscellaneous Fantasy/Sci-fi/Reality stories) that I'm currently a character in, reading/answering my email, and chatting to 3 people on the Yahoo Messenger, just when I'm running out of prepaid internet.

---

This is my new baby. Tomato's already jealous of it. 

It's a shiny black Yamaha upright with 88 keys and 3 pedals.  We bought it just a few days ago, on August 18.  I wasn't asking for a new piano (although our old one, which I've been playing on for 18 years) has been sounding more and more metallic as of late.  The old one was a Yupangco--a local version of Yamaha, and yet we were only able to sell it for 25K! (Imagine a piano being sold for 25K.  That's just the price of a midlevel mobile phone!)  Still, it was traded in for this new one, which I'm absolutely ecstatic with.  It sounds gorgeous, with unbelievable sound and resonance.  On the afternoon that it was delivered, I played for 4 hours straight, until my back, shoulders, and wrists were aching like hell. I've bought a lot of new pieces, and I'm planning to review my 7 years' classical training even for just a few months before I re-start residency.  I'm mostly besotted with lyrical pieces like Canon in D and arrangements by Jim Brickman or George Winston.  For local arrangers, I recommend JonJon or Boboy Bagayaua, as they're the ones who seem to be able to capture the spirit of the songs best.

---

Can man and woman still find Paradise

in the world outside the Garden of Eden?

I just bought this yesterday, and I was done reading it an hour after getting home because I was already devouring it in the car.  It's a mature graphic novel portraying the extremely funny but very realistic relationships of six people who could easily be any six of us who are still lost in this world despite two decades of living in it.  There are some extremely funny but graphic (in the sense that it's vividly portrayed not on paper but in your head) parts, and the humor is oftentimes cynical, toilet-related, and raunchy.  Yet, nothing in it really offends (and I find a lot of things offensive), because everything plays a part in telling the story. 

By the time I arrived at the last page, I was bawling like a baby, with tears of triumph and joy.  And books don't make me cry easily.  Nothing of Nicholas Spark's ever really moved me.  In short, I highly recommend this book.  It won the Manila Critics Book Circle Awards (did I get that right?).  It's one of those Filipino works that I would proudly tell a foreigner:  "This was written by one of us!!"

A sample review: 
“After Eden is a love story that involves six people, serendipitous weather disturbances, and the minions of heaven and hell. It is, by turns, strange, hilarious and heartbreaking -- a story that somehow manages to be complex and yet pure and simple at the same time. It is also the best thing Arnold Arre has done so far, and that's really saying something, considering that he's won National Book Awards for his previous works, The Mythology Class and Trip to Tagaytay. Arnold has truths to tell about love, friendship, loyalty and betrayal, and he tells them with an eloquence -- in words and pictures -- that is all his own.”
-Luis Joaquin M. Katigbak, author of Happy Endings

---

This is the finished game of Scrabble that I played with Tomato last week.  I won, but just barely.  We had a lot of fun tossing each other weird words, just to see if the other would accept it, since we didn't have a dictionary handy.  Next time I'm going to tell him that there are new rules:  medical terms will be allowed.  He won't even know if I'm bluffing harharhar...

---

Lastly, here's something I really have to internalize: (from Fortitudine Vincimus)

State of Mind

If you think you are beaten, you are;
If you think you dare not, you don't!
If you'd like to win, but you think you can't,
It's almost certain you won't.

If you think you'll lose, you're lost;
For out in the world we find
Success begins with a fellow's will;
It's all in the state of mind!

If you think you're outclassed, you are;
You've got to think high to rise.
You've got to be sure of yourself
Before you 'll ever win the prize.

Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man;
But sooner or later the man who wins
Is the person who thinks he can!

Author Unknown

---

   I used to think that doctors all over the world--as long as they came from a technologically advanced or updated country--treated their patients the same way.

   I thought that they used the same references, the same standards, and the same diagnostic techniques.

   I thought that they gave the same drugs, in the same doses, in the same formulations, using fail-proof algorithms that pinpointed exactly who needed that drug and who didn't.

   I thought that Medicine is one frontier where evidence-based knowledge and principles made sure that patients were treated as scientifically as possible so that there was a minimum of conflict among the caregivers.

   I was wrong. 

   In fact, disagreements are routine among physicians in the same team, much less the same hospital.  Even longtime partners bicker over what to order or not to order for a patient that they had been co-managing for years. 

   This is made official and a little less barbaric in a formal presentation staged supposedly to educate us younger colleages: the Grand Rounds.  But listen closely, strip off the courtesy, and you'll realize that it sounds just like a trial, with a prosecution and a defense.

   Thus it's no wonder that physicians from differing countries can manage their patients so differently, each thinking that they are doing the best for a certain condition even when they're using contradictory methods.  Cases in point:

• Low blood pressure is considered a sign of health in the United States, but a sign of sickness in Germany
• Hysterectomies are performed infrequently in France, but is one of the most common major operations in the United States
• American doctors significantly perform more cardiac bypass operations per capita than do English doctors
• American doctors are more likely to be aggressive with their approach than their British colleages.  Americans are likely to treat until the treatment is shown to be harmful, while the British tend to wait until the treatment has been shown to be beneficial.  (All from Medicine and Culture by Lynn Payer)

   And yet, the people who live in America, England, Germany, and France have equivalent life expectancy rates, meaning that even some widely divergent medical treatments don't significantly alter the course of disease.  It appears that there is a wide margin for error.  Our systems are actually pretty resilient. 

   So next time you hear your doctors arguing, don't fret right away.  They might both be right, after all.

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