Been having really terrible meal schedules lately, what with the deluge of patients in the clinics, the wards, and in the chemotherapy units. I was therefore ecstatic when a patient gave me box of uraro, a flower-shaped sweet cookie that disintegrates if you leave it in your hands long enough.

Many of my colleagues are currently attending the European Society of Medical Oncology in Paris (inggit!), and I’m standing in as the reliever, also known as “taong bahay”. Some of them can’t resist and still message me stuff about their patients that they might have forgotten to endorse, and I have to remind them to enjoy their trip and forget whatever’s going on back here. It’s super hard, but when you go on leave you just have to go all out and reset your brain and leave all worries behind. Recently submitted VISA requirements for a trip in October and anxiously waiting for its approval. I need this long vacation. Gathering the requirements for VISA application is, by itself, a task worth of a long vacation.

I was gastritic by the time we got to have lunch. We haven’t eaten in Katherine’s in Glorietta since 2019, so we thought we should try it out again. All I remember about what I ate back then was it was mostly form over substance, like the food looked pretty but did not taste all that great. So we decided to give it a second chance. Of course I don’t even remember the name of the food. It’s some roasted chicken breast on a bed of gulay on top of red rice. Or was it brown rice. There was a slice of lemon on the side. I was so hungry I’ve consumed the damn thing without really discerning whether it was good or not.

Of course I can’t end a bloggeth entry without advertising my book. It felt surreal getting the physical book in my hands for the first time, although still just a prototype mailed to me by the publisher. It was my last chance to make corrections that were hopefully not too major. I was so sure I wouldn’t find any further typo, being practically blind to it after having read it two billion times, but I still found two misplaced commas, an apostrophe that shouldn’t be there, and a wandering preposition. Luckily super minor that wouldn’t lead to pagination changes. I had to write “OK to print” and sign my name. As soon as I did I felt dread in my stomach, second guessing myself about the stuff I’ve written. But as Ryan said, “OWN IT!”

Categories: Blogs