It's truly been a wild ride, reflecting on my path to this point, and yet it feels like mundane, like “everyday.” Hours upon hours spent holed in, romanticizing about making music and performing, yet filling my brain with biological pathways of disease, symptom presentations, medications – the entire gamut of all there is to know about a disease and it's cure. Studying medicine from lectures and books as a pre-clinical student provided me with the language which predisposed me to practice it with the philosophy of an “artist” whilst I was auditioning at various hospitals at the start of my fourth year.
In many ways, my background as a musician framed my thinking whenever I was in the hospital speaking to patients, colleagues, fellow students, and my attendings (my bosses).
Now, I get a summer to delve into music and to perform as much as possible before I begin residency in NYC. I get to free my creative spirit and fully indulge in the healing nature of sound and movement. While I aim to be the best doctor possible, and it often feels like I live some “double life” being both musician and medical student, the two could not feel more intertwined for me. Through my research at the College of Music and Center of Ethnomusicology at the University of the Philippines, I realized that music in indigenous Filipino culture, was the background tapestry to everyday activities, and was used to heal. By profession, I have sought out to become a healer (of sorts). It is almost ancestral (or at least “cultural”) for me to blend my two passions. In an age where doctor's voices and warnings about health and the direction of our country are silenced, art could not be more important. Art brings folks together, it eases tensions, it provides symbolism for concepts and feelings which are difficult to understand. It allows folks to be connected and well-informed.
Before I delve into too much of a tangent, I'll bring us back to the idea of how wild yet normal it feels to graduate in a little under two weeks. I wake up these days and am unsure of what each day brings (fourth year medical student life lol) – it could bring a new song, a chat with an old friend, a run, good coffee, words to allow my insatiable curiosity to sink its claws into – yet I have the knowledge that I will graduate with these letters (D.O.) after my name which affords me some credibility. I also firmly believe that I am no smarter, nor more kind, nor more [insert any quality] than the next person (in an egalitarian sense of that sentiment). However, I do believe that my background and my training serves as some prerogative for having to do something and to help someone in this world. And I will, in due time. And I will also continue to have chats, drink coffee, read, and write music.