They make the ward a beautiful place

As I draw near them, some of them pretend to sleep. Some of them give me a derisive smile and the please-fuck-off look upon learning the fact that I actually am just a student. Some of them appear to be delirious and uninterested without bothering to answer any of my questions. Some of them get fed up when I am already halfway doing the history taking. These, are what happen in the ward. It is typical of the patients to be impolite to medical students.

It hurts at times, to be scorned and treated with hostility. Really.

Nonetheless, there are patients who make me feel damn great about myself. They are people who guide me how to insert my 2 fingers into their vaginas, people who greet me with an encouraging smile despite my failure in taking their blood (by venipuncture), and dying patients with valvular heart disease who allow me to appreciate their cardiac murmurs…and so on.

I still remember that pleasant and friendly woman with cervical carcinoma in pregnancy who died 3 days after I took her history. I still remember that 46-year-old nulliparous woman with an ovarian mass the size of a football and whose malignancy had yet to be confirmed, that agreed without a second thought to become the subject for our bedside teaching. That warm and chatty lady immobilized by paraplegia in the orthopaedic ward. That amiable boy with atrial septal defect complicated by thalassaemia major in the medical ward.

These are people to whom I feel eternal gratitude and who make the ward a beautiful place I enjoy going.