People ask me, “What are you taking up in—” and I’d immediately go “Nursing!” even before they finish the question.
Growing up, it’s practically inevitable. I come from a medical family. My mom and her parents are doctors, and my aunt and cousins are nurses. Plus I have countless other relatives from their side who are nurses or dentists or pharmacists. I literally grew up in a hospital. As in literally. The hospital was like my manor, my playground. I went so far as to say once, as a joke, “Sa ospital na ‘to…ako ang batas!” Haha! The building itself has memories that I’m going to treasure forever, even if the meaning of those memories has long since faded. Nevertheless, my environment and my bloodline are only two factors in my decision.
Perhaps my dream was unconsciously drilled into me ever since I was a kid. Ever since, studying the human body has been my favorite science topic. In the school years that we didn’t cover anything about the body, I was admittedly quite bored, but whenever we took up human anatomy, I tended to go all out. At a young age, I had a different sort of vigor for the subject. I mean, while everybody else in my second grade class knew only that eyes=sight out of the five senses, I could already explain how we really see something upside-down and that our brain only turns it right side up. In Grade Three, I knew words like “duodenum” and “transverse colon” in relation to our study of the digestive tract. When I was in Grade Four, I could name all the bones in the body by heart, and a year later, I gave a half-hour long lecture on the skeletal system in front of the entire student body…solo. And for Bio two years ago, instead of doing one report about the body systems, I opted to do two.
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