Abigail and Mon, a photo by Uberdoog on Flickr.
Everyone admires excellence when they see it. A pilot smoothly landing a plane. A ski jumper slaloming down a course. Or Roy, head nurse of the Hemodialysis Unit, setting up the arterial blood lines of the dialysis machines.
What’s that? Did I say dialysis machines? Yup, you read right. You’ve heard of dialysis, right? That’s when your kidneys decide to go on ahead of the rest of you. The rest of you gets messed up because your blood builds up toxins and water builds up too. For that you need dialysis. Dialysis machines are machines the size of two personal refrigerators stacked atop each other and they do the job that two little kidneys, individually smaller than your fist, did. Better than any dialysis machine. But what choice do you have?
Let’s get back to Roy. It's 4 in the morning, he's racing through the set up of the machines. Washing this, plugging that, pushing these buttons, inverting cartridges, purging excess, heck if I know.
Watching Roy is watching excellence. Working with an economy of motion, purposefulness and fluidity, he got one of the machines harnessed and ready to go in no time.
Admiring excellence is like admiring the tip of an iceberg, 90% of their mass is out of sight. With excellence, what you don’t see is the hard work, perseverance from day to day, or the bad hair days with their terrible balls-ups. But I guess it that would be an unfair comparison. Excellence probably hides at least 99% of practice and work.
“Great!” I thought to myself, I have 98 more days to get a little better, but most likely nowhere near as good as Roy. But I was just being flippant and was not actually bothered. The good thing about Nursing is it’s not a competition. At least, not in the usual sense.
All I want these days is a new bag. While the rest of my contemporaries are packing up and looking forward to retirement, I’m moving into new and unexplored territory. I’m having to toughen up, physically and mentally. I’m having to become game, quick, flexible, alert and responsive. If you’re young, you’ll find it hard to imagine how inertia can slow down a middle-aged man. The habits of seeking comfort and familiarity, formed of earlier decades have to be gradually broken. It hurts, but then I have seen the changes to adapt. And the changes feel good. I can see the banner in my head: Old Dog Learns New Trick. So Roy , how do you set up the dialysis machine again?
Originally posted Jan 6, 2010
Being Filipino, I have the tendency to think that all roads lead to the Manila, it being the center of the universe. I fail to add of course, my universe. And being the center of the universe, it builds its own reality, an overwhelming preponderance of seriousness and gravity which travels with me, along with the actual baggage that I have to weigh and check in. Can you imagine how much more the airlines could charge if they could only figure out a method of weighing the local worries and concerns that passengers bring with them when they check at the airport? 
My first hint of familiarity was the language. There were so many words in Bahasa Indonesia that
Whenever I’m in a new place I want to walk. Walking lets you see things and in Solo, Indonesia, I saw the national flower of the Philippines – the Sampaguita - growing by a wall. The Sampaguita (Jasminium sambac) does that in the Philippines. Grows by walls. But doing here what it does 1031 miles away in Manila gave me pause. A little later, I found Atis (Annona squamosa)happily growing near the Solo train station. Again, I had to stop. Later on, I discovered that these plants are endemic to the region. They were not my plants, they were our plants. Now how do you like that?
