si sonny, si auring at si sawi

Most people would like to finish college and graduate in the shortest possible time. Perhaps I belong to the weird ones who can’t seem to detach themselves from the academe. I just love going to school. (Ouch, stop throwing that…)

Consider this: after B.S. Zoology, there was M.D. and D.P.B.A., then there was B.S. Nursing and now there is M.A. Creative Writing. Do I have a hang-up about collecting so many letters after my name? I want to defensively say, definitely not. I know those are just letters and I’m a believer in the journey-destination mismatch. I love journeys. And on these numerous sojourns that I’ve embarked on, I have had the privilege of meeting a lot of (tor)mentors, three of whom will receive special mention in this post.

First, there was Mr. Sonny Daria, my biostatistics teacher in UP Diliman. I do not know where he is now but during my college days he was quite notorious in campus for being a terror teacher and there were several complaints from parents because our exams would always be overnight sessions held from 6 pm ad nauseum which meant up to 6 or 8 am the next day. He did not mind how long it took us to finish the exam as he practically lived in his office in Pavilion IV of the then AS building, anyway. The exams were always “open-notes and open-books” and of course, the answers were not in any of the books and notes that we lugged to the exam room.

Mr. Daria was a nutty-Einstein kind of professor but I looked up to him with awe and admiration, which my roommates said bordered on being a crush-ko-si-sir adulation. And why is that? It is because of the way my brain is wired. It is not programmed to understand numerical equations and formulations and the other mysteries and intricacies of mathematics. But Mr. Daria had a way of teaching, which I cannot put a finger on, that made me appreciate, and dare I say, comprehend, biostatistics. I surfed the net looking for Mr. Daria and instead found another blogger who said Sonny Daria was his favorite teacher, too! Yey!

Then after med school and residency, I went to the National Kidney and Transplant Institute for a fellowship and there met the most-feared and most-revered Dr. Aurea Ambrosio, our beloved Nanay Auring who kept us literally on our toes. We were not allowed to sit during the entire surgical procedure. Indeed there were no stools or seats allotted for the anesthesiologist/s in the OR. Oh, our poor varicose veins! We did a lot of vascular surgeries there and we would look at the vein stripping procedures as our unanimous and inevitable fate.

Being a board examiner, Dr. Ambrosio was particularly hard on us in didactics and in honing clinical skills. She told us that she was that way because someday, in case she needed anesthesia, who else would she trust but us? Not long after that pronouncement, her words came true and I remember our senior fellow, Dr. Chiqui, intubating Dr. Ambrosio. I’m not sure if he cried before, during or after the process. When Dr. Ambrosio recovered, we looked at her, at anesthesia, at learning, and at Dr. Chiqui, with new eyes.

And recently, being a member of the Silliman University Medical School faculty comes with the privilege of taking up any course in SU for free. And this is where I met the famous (or is it infamous?) Dr. Cesar Ruiz Aquino when I enrolled in a Creative Writing course. I was very excited to have this acclaimed writer as my mentor but with each meeting I was growing disenchanted because Sir Sawi’s ideas and beliefs decidedly clashed with mine. His abstract and unstructured way of thinking did not help and I would find my mind wandering off during class. Later I would come to class very late or be absent a lot.

Things came to a head during the final exams when I submitted a shamefully execrable paper which earned me a call for a meeting at his office. It was like a “please-see-the-principal” appointment which turned out to be an almost-heated exchange of disappointments and misconceptions which ended up with me saying, “Sir, if you give me an F I believe it is well deserved” to which he replied “That is the only answer that I liked in this whole conversation.” Wow. Talk about intense.

And like a good narrative, there is a denouement to this story. Today we have come to a truce. I have grown to respect his impeccable wordsmithry and accept the complicated way he thinks and (I hope) he has come to acknowledge that my interest in literature and writing is legitimate and sincere.

So, as the debatable cliché goes, the journey is more important than the destination. I do not know where all these road trips I am taking will lead. But I do know that I have met some very interesting persons, mentors, tormentors and fellow students as well, along the way.