Squished tomatoes.

My third week in the barrio, and already I’m getting these scares about getting all these diseases. In the middle of doing a physical exam on elementary school chldren, I got bitten by what looked like a dengue mosquito, with the white-striped legs and all. But after reviewing what I was already supposed to know by then, I was reassured knowing that the painful bite I got on my arm wasn’t very characteristic of the said mosquito. Nonetheless, I’m still on the lookout for symptoms and signs of dengue, as I am still on the third of my two- to seven-day incubation/observation period.

 

Needless to say, this last week has been jam packed with me and my fellow interns doing PE on almost a thousand grade school kids, with almost 90 percent of whom having head lice. I guess you can’t blame me for getting paranoid and absent-mindedly scratching my head more often now. That, however, is the least of all my worries at the moment.

 

I guess you could say that the most significant experience I had this week would definitely be my having been infected with bacterial conjunctivitis. I’ve never had it before, and I always took it for granted whenever patients would complain about it. I used to think, “”Hey, it’s just sore eyes. All you gotta do is refrain from touching your eyes and wash them often and keep them from getting exposed to dirt, and you’ll be fine.” I didn’t realize until now how much of a pain in the ass it can be. A pain in the eyes, for that matter.

 

This made me realize one very important thing, and that is the importance of taking care of one’s own health. We doctors like to tell people to take care of their health, watch what they eat, refrain from smoking, and whatnot. We get frustrated when patents don’t follow up when we tell them to, or when they don’t take the medications we prescribe or undergo the tests we ask them to. Just a side note, it’s even more frustrating when your own family doesn’t listen to you—my mom has been having episodes of chest pain very characteristic of chronic stable angina. I’ve been telling her to get an ECG and go see a cardiologist. But she’s being so stubborn, and has only been relying on the nitrates I prescribed to her to get her through her episodes. Parents—they can be the most hard-headed patients sometimes.

 

Well, actually, it has always been said that the most hard-headed and stubborn patients are doctors themselves. I know doctors who smoke like a chimney, gobble cholesterol-laden food down like an incinerator, and basically just live their lives not according to the lives they advise their patients to lead. I guess it’s because we all feel so invincible, since most of us hardly feel any immediate effects from the risk factors we expose ourselves to. Personally, I’m guilty on that account. By far, I’ve had a number of needle-stick injuries, one from a Hep B patient, and so far my titers are clean. Also, I’ve probably had a zillion tuberculosis patients, some of them multiple drug-resistant, and sometimes I haven’t been able to handle them without an N95 mask to protect me, and so far I’m still PPD-negative and my annual chest X-rays remain unremarkable.

 

However, now that I’m literally a walking goldfish with squished tomatoes for eyes, I realize the value of keeping myself healthy, not really for my sake, but for the sake of my patients. When my community foster sister came down with conjunctivitis, I gave her the usual line. Just don’t touch your eyes and keep your hands clean. I hardly gave it a second thought when I scratched my eyes a lot that night. It was only when I began to ooze out a freakin purulent, teary, and painful discharge from my eyes the following day, in the middle of seeing grade school kids, that I realized how something as seemingly simple as sore eyes can impede you from doing your work well. I could hardly touch the kids, for fear that I would start an epidemic, and I admit that I wasn’t up to par at all that day.

 

So there you have it. The biggest lesson I learned this week would be to take care of myself first and foremost, because how else can I properly take care of my patients if I’m not healthy enough, to begin with?