crossing the (MD - RN) road

I am one of the thousands of Filipino physicians who have taken up nursing. The following is a collection of vignettes culled along that road between M.D. and BSN. This is also the story of why I have not crossed over from being a doctor to being a nurse... yet.

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“Nurse diay ka, Doc?”

"So, Doctor, you're a nurse?" That is the common line patients and hospital staff would jokingly throw at us. A few years ago, around 40 of us Dumaguete doctors enrolled in an abbreviated nursing course offered in a nearby province. Every Saturday at dawn we would pile into the Ceres bus or van-for-hire and sleep our way through the four hour trip to Bacolod in Negros Occidental.

It was a crazy course for me because I had always been a serious and diligent student but this nursing course was just so wacky and extraordinary, even right from the beginning when we took the entrance exam. The exam was more of a formality, really, because it was unthinkable that doctors in active practice would fail a basic anatomy and physiology test that was supposed to be for high school graduates. During the exam, we were all seated in school desks and we were all wearing reading glasses. Someone quipped "Is this an entrance exam or a PTA meeting?" which cracked us up, tense as we all were, embarking on this lark of an adventure.

We enrolled in the course for various reasons. For me, it was a form of therapy. I needed something different to focus my mind and energies on and studying nursing was just the right distraction at that time.

The subject matter was very familiar to us so how hard could it be? We found some of the lectures though to be kind of… funny. In medicine, we call asthma asthma. In nursing lingo, asthma is called "an alteration in oxygenation related to labored ventilation secondary to airway obstruction secondary to inflammation ." Wow! Quite a mouthful. Or a lungful, if you say that in one breath.

Many times our medical minds would disagree with the complicated and roundabout way nurses make their diagnosis. Our teachers warned us though, "While you are inside this school's premises, remember that you are student nurses, not doctors. You have to abide by the nursing way or else you better step out of the room."

Mindful of the thousands of hard-earned pesos we paid for our tuition, we chose to silence our protests by stuffing food into our mouths each time we felt like arguing a point with the teacher. So our nursing student days were virtual feasts. We would bring lots of food to class: chips, nuts, boiled bananas with bagoong (number one favorite of all), banana que, green mangoes with uyap, other chichiria. As our teacher lectured away, we likewise ate away our baon.

The first long exam was unforgettable. It was a multiple choice type in maternal health and child development nursing (pediatrics, in medical lingo). As it was the first exam, we had a hard time adjusting our mental gears from thinking like doctors into thinking like nurses. It was pretty tricky.

Student M would ask seatmate on the right, “What is your answer to number 16?” “Letter B.” Student M looks to the left and sees that the answer there to number 16 is letter C. Tsk Tsk. They have different answers. Student M surreptitiously glances over at the back and checks out the answer to number 16. It is letter A. Tsk. This is getting worse. Student M walks over, across the aisle, and consults a trusted classmate, “What is your answer to number 16?” It is letter A. Student goes back to his seat and confronts his seatmate on the right. “Why is your answer letter B when their answer is letter A?? Seatmate goes, “If you don’t agree with my answer then don’t copy it!”

Multiply this scenario twenty times and you have a riot in the classroom. What started out as discreet glancing at another’s test paper turned out to be an all out conference. Seems like everybody forgot that it was supposed to be a TEST! Including the teacher who was helpless against a roomful of middle aged MDs openly discussing the way the questions were phrased as well as getting "second opinions" about their answers.

I am not proud at all that I was a participant of such testing atrocity. I just wanted to document how outrageous our course was. That kind of behavior was never repeated though, our teachers made sure of that. And most of my classmates realized the folly of such irresponsible actions and the next exams were rightfully met with adequate preparations. As for me, I did not quite get over that exam, the first exam that I did not take seriously. And so for the rest of the course, I did not really take it seriously, too.

I continued to attend classes though because once in a while we had classic moments. Like for example, we learned how to change the bed sheets with the patient in bed and give patients a full body bath and a shampoo, also in bed. Being small, I was often made a “dummy patient” meaning I would lie on the bed while my classmates changed the sheets. (It was a good time to take a nap as making a perfect miter corner can take some time.) And it brought us delight and guffaws to see consultants energetically giving patients bed baths and bed shampoos and getting themselves (the MD-student nurse) all bathed and shampooed as well! The poor patients were quite amused and graciously allowed us to minister to them, glad to be pampered by the attention of their doctor-student nurses.

Those weekend jaunts went on for maybe about a couple of years and then suddenly it was graduation time. Whoa! I couldn’t believe I was actually graduating so I immediately rented a toga so I could march on stage and convince myself that I had indeed become a nurse.

But a few days before graduation, while complying with final requirements, I learned that there had been a computer glitch and I was not officially enrolled in one subject. In the computer, that is. And even if I had already attended that subject and fulfilled all requirements, I still could not graduate because the computer said I had not enrolled in it. Amazing!

And so I was not able to get my Bachelor of Nursing degree because of a freaky computer error. It is easily correctable, I’m sure, but somehow going to Bacolod seems too tiresome already. My classmates have all passed the national board exam and some have even passed the international exams and have actually gone to work abroad.

People often ask me, “O, so why are you still here? Don’t you know that nurse anesthetists are among the highest paid nurses anywhere? Nurse man ka, Doc, di ba?”

I say, “Not quite.”