Because I forgot to greet him on his birthday last June, I decided to pay a tribute to Ting Tiongco. And since he is one person I know who wants to tell stories and share it with different people, I wanted to share part of him to some of my friends here by featuring four stories from his latest book. These are actually four of the my favorite ones. I was planning to feature just three but i can't choose which one to drop, so four, why not! LOL. I could feature the whole book, but since it is the University of the Philippines(UP) Press who owns the rights now as the publisher, I cannot really get away from them by just sweet talking them into forgiving me... if it was the author who published it, that would have been an easier one to deal with. lmao.
(click book to read book reveiw)
PSYCHIATRY
By the time we reached our internship year, the fifth year in the UPCM, most of us in the Class 71 already knew where we were going and what we were going to do after graduation. Most of my classmates were preparing their applications for entry in the various hospitals in the
As Interns we were required to rotate through all the other departments in the hospital during the whole internship year. And I was glad we did. Because even as I had already decided to be a surgeon, I thoroughly enjoyed my rotations in the other departments. Except psychiatry.
Perhaps it was because I really wasn’t the introspective type. I hated to delve into personal problems. I could not divide myself into Id, Ego and Superego. And I could not do that to others either. So I had some trepidations as my rotation in psychiatry drew closer although I was sure that not everything in psychiatry had to do with dark subconscious urges that subverted one’s mental stability because some of my fellow interns who had already been through psychiatry told funny stories about the patients that made us all laugh. One female intern had thought her patient liked her very much because he gave her an apple everyday. It was only after the end of two weeks that she discovered that he believed in the maxim: An apple a day, keeps the doctor away. There was also a suicidal patient who could never get around to killing himself because he could not find anybody to accept his treasured comb, which he wanted to bequeath before he jumped out of the second floor window. The most bizarre one was the patient who was fond of hiding from the doctors by perching himself on top of the big tall doors of PGH, like a rooster. He got a kick out of the fact that we never routinely looked up the ceiling when ever we entered the rooms. We called him ‘D’ninja’.
My misgivings about psychiatry where confirmed when my rotation came. I was given a patient I could not make heads or tails of. Charmaine was a chemical engineering graduate from UP Diliman. Her mother was suffering from terminal cancer and it was Charmaine’s great desire to pass the chemical engineering board before her mother died. So she studied diligently. But just before the board exam, her boyfriend with whom she was engaged to be married died suddenly in a car accident. This really unsettled her but she took the exam anyway. And failed. Shortly after, her mother also died. Triple Whammy. So she decided to shut the whole world off.
Charmaine would sit on a chair the whole day, absolutely still and quiet, not seeing, hearing, or feeling anything. They would lead her out to the garden but she would stay exactly where they left her, unmoving and unaffected by anything. She had to be fed and diapered. She had gone away somewhere, far away from the world she didn’t like.
My job as the intern was to talk to her everyday and report any progress in her recovery. I was at my wit’s edge. How can one talk to somebody whose eyes seemed to be looking somewhere beyond one’s head? After I exhausted my store of platitudes about life being not as bad as it seems, clouds with silver linings, and suns coming out tomorrow, I was totally and completely lost. I would come out of the interview room really deeply depressed and frustrated myself.
I envied my co intern, Alban, who was assigned to Timmy, who was a recovering obsessive-compulsive case and was due for discharge anytime. Timmy was a friendly and spirited fellow who hung around the ping-pong table in the recreation room. Alban would play a few sets with him for his therapy and then later gleefully leave with his girlfriend for the canteen, satisfied that his patient was alright. I would be left in the psychiatry ward trying to find something good to say to Charmaine and getting more and more frustrated everyday.
One day when Alban had left earlier than usual, Timmy challenged me to a ping pong match. He was surprisingly very good at the game and I had a fine time playing with him. I had a good enough forehand drive and was honing my very rusty backhand drive in the game. Timmy was a worthy opponent. We were evenly matched.
So it became a pattern everyday. Talk to Charmaine for an hour or two. Get depressed and frustrated. Then take out my depression and frustration by punishing the ping pong ball with forehand and back hand drives in life and death games with Timmy.
After a while, to save my sanity, I decided to reverse the roles in my sessions with Charmaine. Since she would not talk or react, I decided that I would be the patient and she, the doctor. So I talked to her about my life in the way I imagined a patient would talk to a psychiatrist. I talked about my fears and frustrations, my childhood, my family, my ambitions, my friends, my studies, my relations with women, objects of my love and lust, and by the time two weeks were over, I had even talked about my sex life, which, as I was made to understand in psychiatry lectures, is very important in Freudian psychoanalysis. And all that time, Charmaine sat in total silence, absolutely still, staring far away into the distance. She was just not there.
When I left psychiatry, Charmaine had shown absolutely no progress. She was just as depressed and distant as ever. Timmy’s discharge from the hospital however was postponed because he suddenly went into depression, never letting go of his ping pong racket and hitting imaginary ping pong balls with it, even in bed. Alban was in a bit of a depression, too, because from his vantage in the canteen, he could not understand what happened to his patient in the psychiatric ward.
But I felt surprisingly good after two weeks in psychiatry. Talking about all the minutiae in my life was an excellent catharsis. And the daily ping pong sessions improved my game tremendously and at that time, I was flicking wicked backhand drives at supersonic speeds and beating Timmy by love sets every time, anytime.
Months later found me in my Orthopedics rotation, cutting away old, smelly plaster of paris casts from fracture patients with a stryker saw the whole day. It was dirty, noisy work and not really pleasant because the patients usually had more than their share of body odor, not being able to take regular baths with their casts on. And the stench permeated into my clothes and hair, especially since I was working in a small hot room with the cumulative stink of the discarded casts on one side.
So I took five minutes from my job, loaded all the detritus on a trolley, and slowly pushed my malodorous load down the hospital corridor to the garbage bin. People gave me a wide berth.
All, except one ravishing example of a female who staccatoed down the corridor on her stiletto heels. She was making a bee line for me and my smelly load. Her beautiful face was impeccably made up and she was in a soft clinging dress that suggested all her curves as she made her way to my trolley and me. Sexy wasn’t a word for her. She was voluptuous in a very thrilling way.
Embarrassed with her attention, I shook off some of the plaster of paris dust from my hair, blew some away from my glasses, surreptitiously checked my sweaty underarms for my own BO, and pushed my trolley a little more to the side to let her pass without being offended by the smell. But her eyes twinkled and her face broke into the sweetest smile as she put out a hand and touched my sleeve. I could smell Dior.
‘Hello, Dr. Tiongco!’ a well modulated alto said. ‘And how are your Mom and Dad?’
Mouth agape and stuttering excuses, I desperately tried to remember where we met before. I figured that if she knew my parents, then she must have come from
She noticed my confusion and gave a low throaty laugh that sent large doses of testosterone pulsing through my arteries.
‘But don’t you remember me?’ She asked. ‘I’m your friend, Charmaine!’
It must have been a bizarre sight: a clearly demented Intern, dancing a jig of joy around a beautiful woman, unmindful of the usual crowd in a busy PGH corridor. I could not believe my eyes. I praised all the saints in heaven and all the psychiatrists in PGH. And I had always thought that doctors became psychiatrists mainly because they wanted to solve their own personal problems!
So all the time I was chattering away about my life, she had been listening intently even as she stared blankly into space! We stood a long time in the corridor and talked animatedly like long lost friends. Until the ortho nurse came out to tell me that my patients were already getting impatient waiting for me in the small hot cast room.
So we said goodbye and I continued pushing my load to the garbage bin. But just as I was throwing the casts into the bin, I suddenly remembered that I had also told her all about my sex life. I turned around quickly to take another look at her.
She was still standing in the middle of the corridor, still looking at me. She gave me a little wave and another smile. But now I could not decide if it was really a smile or a sly grin.
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