Death And All His Friends

“A human life is made up of choices, live or die, that's the important choice and it's not always in our hands.”

In medicine, they say that a dying person has this specific aura, a specific scent. Death is common and a natural process for us; it’s inevitable however we’ll do our best to revive a dying person. We, as your doctors, are not gods.

In first year of medical school, we were introduced with death via cadaver. We studied every organ, every tissue every vein, every artery and every nerve with our cadaver. That’s our first taste of what death looks and feels like. In succeeding years we study the normal human process as well as the pathologic process of every disease. In third year, we study post mortem cases. And in every pathophysiology, what we try to figure out is how did this person die?

But death hits hard when it occurred to a loved one…

To my lola Inggay. I love you so much. I know you’re in a better place, a place with no suffering and pain. I know you’re with lolo iko and finally you’re together again. I’ll always pray for you as always, I’ll light a candle everytime I attend a novena or visited a church. And I will never forget the things you thought me. Mamimiss ko yung luto mong adobo sa atsuwete.

“In medical school, we have a hundred lessons that teach us how to fight off death, and not one lesson on how to go on living.”