My Thank You to You, PSH

Went through my 9th graduation yesterday! Haha, looking forward to next one, hopefully.

Happy to have had one of my highly held mentors feel like he was a pufferfish, bursting with pride at the sight of all the graduates in the chapel at 3A.

I thank the CME for giving me the honor of thanking everybody on behalf of the graduates so when they called my name, I stepped to the podium, adjusted the microphone, looked up, smiled and said:

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.

Just lately, I’ve come to realize how amusing it is for people to think, that after achieving a milestone in life, things get a lot easier -- you get to catch a lot more breaks here and there, or things might even get handed to you on a better-looking platter. Conversations in the coming days will go like, “O, musta na ka?” (Oh, how are you) or “Asa naman ka ron?” (Where are you based now?) and you’ll gamely reply with a smile, “Bag-o pa graduate.” (I've just graduated) or “Magsugod pa tawon.” (I'll still be starting out), and the response will be, “Aw, pero hayahay na na.” (But, it's gonna be easier now) or “Aw, basta kay humana na ka.” (Well, at least you're done!)

Come to think of it, after every personal milestone in my life, which has included eight prior graduations, that has always been the case with the all the questions, but the answers were never really the right.

Has it ever really been any easier? For every step, there has been more responsibility and more at stake. Consequently, every step has been way harder than the previous and every year a bit more challenging than the year before.

Who can remember their first days of residency – the wide eyes, the nerves, the first calls to consultants, the first reprimands, the first deaths, their first operations, their first codes, their first deliveries? As the days became weeks, weeks became months, and months became years, in came seniority, more responsibility, more disagreements and more conflicts.

So no, it has never gotten any easier. It never does and it never will.

Actually, it gets harder from here on out.

And so, what do we have to thank for after 3 or 4 years in PSH?

We thank everybody for the training.

We came here to train, learn and be more confident in treating our patients in our chosen specialties, and, personally, I can truly say that I am coming out of this institution a better doctor than when I first came in. The knowledge taken from conferences, lectures, rounds, and even mistakes, is what my mother has always said about education when I was a kid – something that cannot be truly taken away from me. So the training, the medicine, and the education we will cherish and be grateful for wherever we go from here.

But more importantly, we thank PSH for the company in this stage of our careers and this stage of our lives.

It was one of the constants we had for the past 3 or 4 years in our lives. Here, we have made our shares of irreplaceable friendships and maybe some forgettable ones. Each of the individual graduates here have shared their lives in one way or another to our second home – some fell in love here, others found their freedoms, some gave birth, some got married here and some found somewhere else to be aside from being anywhere else. And we can’t deny that all the laughter, the tears, the pains and joys, the sleepless nights turning into endless dawns, the endless holidays spent away from our families to tend to our work and the company we kept here in PSH have helped us along our way to become better persons and helped us grow.

In the past few days, I’ve had a couple of people ask me, “Is your speech ready?” or even to the extent of a friend from another hospital, jokingly asking for a copy of what I was going to say in front of you today, I’ve continuously replied with a mixture of earnest questioning and surprise. I will never have enough paper to say how I feel about having been here the past 3 years. To truly grasp that idea, one would have to be here, train here, experience it and live it here.

So to PSH, we all thank you for everything.

To our mentors, and tormentors, to our consultants, and insultants, to the staff, from the nurses to the guards that watch our cars in the parking lot, our parents, families and significant others, our utmost and immeasurable gratitude.

We all yearn to be remembered.

From a few weeks to a smattering of years from now, some of you that will be fortunate to still be here will recall an anecdote, a blooper, a desirable and undesirable quality from each of us here that you might use to make a point to some goo-goo eyed first year resident. That is our imprint on the whole PSH experience.

But rest assured, we will remember your imprint on our lives and we will be forever grateful.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you and good afternoon.

Much was said about it -- funny, facetious, nice, quaint -- but I tell you it is three things, honest, heartfelt, real.

Thank you PSH