Today I only have one patient to rounds, and I have no scheduled clinic, tasks, and other responsibilities (as far as I want to admit–of course there are my QURE responsibilities where I have to score the online tests of oncologists overseas, the lengthy tax stuff I have to prepare, the toys that still need to be taken photos of, and other trifles). Maybe it’s the pasukan blues, but most of my patients have decided they wanted their chemoes rescheduled due to financial constraints. It astounds me how one chemo session could cost a whole year of their high school kids’ tuition fees, but there are things I would opt not to ruminate about right now lest I get depressed as hell. And of course there are the mortalities, it’s been a bad two months for mortalities.

Yesterday I’ve decided I wouldn’t do anything productive. For some reason or another I didn’t want to write, read anything of substance, or watch any movie or TV show. So I’ve lain in bed the whole fucking day and scrolled scrolled scrolled thru my devices for the most useless crap on the internet. Mostly I’ve watched 90’s music videos, which would lead me to look for live/concert performances, which would lead me to search Wikipedia for some behind the scenes details. Proof of how far I’ve gone: I’ve watched the Kula Shaker video Govinda which has been on heavy repeat in MTV back in 1997. I don’t know anybody who knows anybody who knows anybody in the current multiverse who still has Kula Shaker in their subconscious, and I don’t even like that band, but for some reason it popped in my head and I’ve decided to waste 5 minutes on it. I’ve looked at Instagram cake pictures of the cousin of a friend of a co-worker’s girlfriend, and marvelled at the millions of travel pictures of Ardee Lugo. I was essentially just waiting since 7 am for the basketball game of Ginebra at 5:15 PM, and by the time the team lost again miserably I went back to scrolling the fuck out of the day.

It made me feel horrible. I didn’t know exactly how I would describe the experience, until Zen Queen of The Arthritides succinctly told me how it feels:

“I’ve done that before. At the end of the day you feel like SHIT.”

And what a shitty feeling it indeed was. I could imagine invisible giant bangyaws buzzing around me as I corpsily whiled away valuable time. Argument could be made for downtime being good, but the same could be said for being emotionally dead–sounds appealing and dramatic, but you’re still emotionally dead just the same regardless how you feel about it.

Back in February 2013 as a sort of farewell to our lives as Hellows, Frichmond, Smoketh and I went to the UP Fair. We stopped over on the way to the restaurant owned by Kuya Bodjie in an attempt to see Kuya Bodjie, but to no avail. We had pasta and stuff. I saw a long-haired girl with a bunch of burloloys all over, a long flowy scarf around her neck, tan-lines and all the trappings, and she was typing on her Mac while sipping her taragon tea. I took a quick glance at what she was typing and saw that she was writing a screenplay. That made me sad as I’ve reflected on a career I’ve wanted back then, a career that could have led me on a totally different direction until I was diskarilled by this thing called… all together now… LIFE.

After a year of re-establishing some practical order in my life I’ve sort of decided now that maybe we should give this dead non-career one more try, there are downtimes waiting for it. I’ve looked at some avenues for it, some very tempting, but all having nothing to do with my present career as a doctor. Life might not have been the most cooperative of all things, but instead of forcing it to cooperate maybe I could just give it one crispy, giant middle finger.

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