Feelings
Once a daughter, twice a doctor!
By Emmanuelle
THE results were out near midnight of Wednesday, exactly three working days from the last day of the August 8-9, 15-16 2009 Physician (Complete, Finals and Finals with Prelims) Licensure Examination given by the Board of Medicine in the cities of Manila, Cebu and Davao. The Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) announced that, out of the 2,357 registered examinees, 71.28% passed.
So, beginning Wednesday midnight and lasting through and past dawn of Thursday, this newest batch of 1,680 doctors, these August-passers, tapped keys with all fingers and flooded Globe, Smart and Sun and the other wired and wireless communication providers with the news of their success, as if passing more or less ten years of pre-and proper medicine prior to taking the Board was not success enough. News (I passed, I passed, I passed! But, oh please, don’t string-out yet the streamer across the street! I would be so embarrassed to death!), shouts of hurrahs (Eeeeeee! at Eeeeeee! pa), congratulations, and more often than not, shocked sobs and stunned tears.
How can these young lifesavers be so brainy, so smart and yet be so unsure, so insecure of themselves!
Even the lines straight to heaven got clogged. Thank you! Thank you Lord, Mama Mary of Manaoag, Baby Jesus, all the saints and guardian angels, mine and borrowed. Do not worry po, I shall keep my promise. No consultation fee for the first one hundred patients. At tulad nang naipangagako ko na po sa gobyerno, no going-abroad for the next two years. Or five.
Balet ngarud, this is not about statistics, although the write-up is dotted with stats. Neither is this about the behavioral study of the histrionics of hysterics.
This series is about the parents whose joy it is to fulfill the last, or one of the last, of their obligations to their children. Grown-up children now in their mid-twenties, but still children in their eyes. No. Younger. Babies even.
The board examinees whose last names were from A to R were assigned to the University of the East along Recto. If you were surnamed from S to Z, you take the exam blocks farther, at the Manuel L. Quezon University. The other test sites were in Cebu and Davao. You have to be from there to take it there. Otherwise, there would be a lot of impossibly long commuting to haul.
For two weekends, for a total of four days of two Saturdays and two Sundays, one or both parents of ten but not more than twenty board examinees were observed to have come with their son or daughter as early as 6 o’clock in the morning. They wait-out the passing of the day from breakfast to morning snack to lunch to afternoon snack. And at day’s end, it was their joy too to keep step with those of the tired and dragging ones of their children, adaptive and supportive to the end.
So, let us start with the doctor-mom, who raised and reared and sent to medical school three other doctors, the youngest of which is this daughter she brought to UE for the board exam. She waited out the day sleeping in her car with her other doctor-daughter. When the car air-conditioning got too warm for comfort, doctor-mom slept with her head hanging out the window. She did not leave her waiting spot. For four days.
Stories dear and true. See you next week. Bring a hanky just in case.
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