July Note: Keeping the dream alive I am keeping my hope with this post. Imagining is some sort of a balm in Gilead.
I don’t know the exact time when my fascination with science, health science in particular, started. As far as
anecdotes inform us, some got to specialize on arachnids out of childhood spoiled time gathering spiders at sundowns. Others on magic after a one-time stroll at a carnival. Some on varnishing intricately designed wooden doors and window sills partly due to the outgrown brain conditioning of lacquer thinner (hazardous to health actually) from one’s neighborhood furniture shop, and partly to the array of glossy doors at a posh subdivision – a source of personal accomplishment. I’m sure you also are a stickler to your own source of fascination. But mine is really along personal health that’s closely tied up with our biological givens and anything that still evolves, or diminishes as we grow old, in our body.
It must have started with those white coats that doctors wear, that according to sociologists are not only a symbol of desire to purify whatever biological taint there is, but more suggestively, of power. You see one wearing a white coat with a name stitched in longhand even in malls and the mind reflexively dictates of an ambulating power around, even if the emotional reaction could vary individually depending on personal experience with those power holders. The white coat is power over biological malady what the clerical soutane is over spiritual malaise.
My experience was a mixture of awe and provocation. I see those array of blue and red and black pens on the chest pocket of their coat and a feeling of amazement would envelop me – “Wow! So many ballpens!” I knew Kilometrico if I see one and a Uni if it’s pinned on. But my childhood bafflement stemmed from the practical question of usage and numbers – why so many? The question apparently was flavored with a grade school bias – seldom did I report to school with even a pair of pens. It was either a lone, blue, non-transparent, plastic overall Kilometrico, a see-through Uni, or a white-bodied, big ball-pointed Bic whose ink one can never predict when to run out.
And the provocation? Well, my mother had a recurring ulcer and any hospital time, she could curl up with a monstrous pain that had me running to the nurse’s station. Ulcer patients and their caregivers know how the pain could become a routine episode it becomes less catchy of the staff’s attention. Figure a child almost freaking out to extend help for his mother and what to that child was a seemingly sluggish response from the staff but from a medical point of view is a calm response protocol. The child could only wonder, a little panicky, on top of those ballpens and dangling stethoscopes and leisurely confident cadence on the hospital hallways. “I’ll get to the business of healing someday,” promised the child to himself, believing that ballpens are still important because according to Bluep in his post, writing skill is a career edge.
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Photo credit: kimatangan
This post is supposed to be on CD4+ T cells and cancer. but sometimes, free writing dictates its own rhythm.








