She looks up the sky and squints at the blazing sun. Every time she walks to the hospital her eyes are on the blue sky because it makes her happy. She rarely looks at the ground.
She lifts her chin and smiles. A thought crosses her mind—she still remembers how broken she was last year. The pain of last year lingers but it does not make her cold. It’s just a memory, stored in the library of her mind, gathering dust until its existence is forgotten. The intern is whole again.
“Good morning Doc”
She smiles and salutes the guards at the gate. They wave her off as she stops for thermal scanning. She laughs and asks for her temperature using their digital bling bling which they point at her forehead. “Doc, 36.5 a”.
She will miss them…the Manong guards who let her pass through without scanning her temperature, recognize her even if she fails to wear her coat and returns her salute all the time no matter how sloppy her execution is. They even allow her to pass through the exit gate when it’s too hot to cross to the entrance.
She does another salute as she passes the guard at the lobby.
Passing through the long corridor she walks briskly in the direction of the Female Quarters. Her gaze flickers and her heart pounds as she sees him going in the opposite direction. They pass by each other like strangers. She looks down and increases her pace. Two months ago, she would have smiled and he would give her that boyish grin or they would both stop and chat. They were once friends and now they seem invisible to each other. This is what makes leaving hard for her—a broken friendship. Everything about internship would have been perfect but that one event changed the experience.
She trembles as she punches the 4-digit combination to the Female Doctor’s Quarters. She silently curses how she has let him affect her this way. Distracted, she plops on her salmon pink sheets and kicks off her shoes. Stacks of books occupy the foot of her bed with her yellow-green scrubs on top of the pile. A unused broom rests on the wall across her—it’s made from a different material—it was a gift from a patient when she was on OB-GYNE rotation. She smiles. It’s an unusual gift but it was made from the crafting hands of her patient. She is a broom-maker and she gave one away for her because she assisted at the OR when she had her hysterectomy.
She dons her white coat and heads to the Internal Medicine Department Office.
“Wow, Avs last day mo na, congrats!”
“Libre, libre!”
” When ang shifting party?”
She laughs but her heart is sinking.
She just wants to be an intern.
Then the prophecy of medicine dictates that she has to go up a notch higher than her totem pole level.
Tomorrow she will no longer be The Intern.She will be a bum…waiting to take the board exams.
Tomorrow she will turn a year older.
It’s a double turning point.
Post-graduate Internship has come full-circle.
Nobody understands better what this year has meant for her except for her friend Boston.
As it comes to an end, she concludes that this was one of the best years of her life—-losing and finding her self once more in this chaotic public hospital.
In this hospital she has learned to love medicine once again—after a bitter clerkship year at the University Hospital she finds out that there are better places where respect is gained and earned, where things are done better .
This is the place to be.
WVMC is home. The Intern belongs here. …but for now she has to go.
It has been a long year.
Everything has been worth it.
The Intern is happy.
The Intern is signing off…:-)
