Birthday wish

Scratch my previous post.

For my birthday,

just give me a wooden stool and a rope.

If birthday fairies are real

20th Birthday wish list :

-to LAUGH with my father, mother, anya and soiti
-document my temporary youth in PICTURES
-Fly out of this city. TRAVEL
-see TIME differently. To leave behind sad seconds.
-get CLARITY of things.
-experience PEACE OF MIND
-watch the SUNSET with closed eyes.
-SWIM without any care in the world.
-DANCE under the moonlight in a white dress
-receive a LETTER in a bottle
-white LILIES in a vase
-BOOKS to fill me with wisdom and new hope.
- something to start DOCUMENTING incoming happy days.
-SMILES from my closest friends

Heart for Caring -The Path I Use to Hate

Enumerated on a sheet of paper was a list of courses in Ateneo de Zamboanga University, it took me 5 seconds to decide, with a swift swish of my pen, I chose BS Nursing.

I never really cared what path I was supposed to take to get to medical school, my sole concern was that it had to be related to science and medicine. My target was set; I tunnel-visioned medical school via the Nursing department.

To be brutally honest, in the early days of my college life, I regretted putting that Nike logo in the tiny box besides the print 'Nursing'. It came upon me that nursing was a crappy path to medical school. Literally, I had to wipe asses and clean crap.

Often, I whined like the spoiled-brat that I am to my folks: "Why did you let me take up nursing? Why mom? Why dad? Why? Don't you love me?”.

Pretty much, I had the lowest respect for my course. It was to me, domesticity gone pro. Clinical instructors would say "nursing is an art", boy, did that ever made me frown.

I found the classroom lectures in my freshman year quite trivial. And the return-demos of procedures such as "proper hand washing", "bed making", and "proper shampooing to a patient"; I found extremely pathetic and thought-allergic.

Then came the later days of my sophomore year. Lectures became tougher and no longer trivial. We started dealing with Pathophysiology, Pharmacy, Zoology and much much more.

Little by little, we got to attend to real patients with very much real needs. I never failed in my task as a nursing student, but I guess, looking back, I failed as a human.

I tended needs as if patients were made up of nothing but physiologic. My heartless duties did not last too long though. Some patients got to me.

I slowly opened my blinds and saw how human they are, actually, more human than I was. They had needs, and it was my duty to take care of them. Slowly I saw them at a different light. I saw how fragile my patients are and how big my responsibility is. I began to have an actual appreciation for my course. I gave it its much-deserved respect.

In nursing, I realized, it is not all about the trivial procedures nor the medicine that solidifies it, it is mostly about the heart of caring. And by caring I mean totally caring, for your patients’ needs, rights and soul.

Nursing is a big boulder of morale and principles. The very foundation of nursing roots to the respect and care of another being, attributing his or her rights as the push or the pull.

We learn through experience. Without it, we can never utter a word of judgement or critic. And nurses, being all evidence-based, I can say how important ethics and moral is to most of the nurses I have encountered with.

No fancy medical term in science could describe how much love and care for the human dignity there is in nursing.

Yes, a lot still has yet to grasp the importance of ethics in this enterprise that is nursing; but the mere fact that a number of people put into effort the preserving, maintaining and improving of ethics in the profession is something to be happy about.

There is heart in the core of nursing, and it is just right that it radiates through every health care giver there is.