Tuesday, November 27, 2007 A place we call home By Henry L. Yu, M.D.
ONE medical school in Cebu will be celebrating its golden or 50th anniversary.
Cebu Institute of Medicine (CIM) was born in 1957. It is the very school that has made me and its other graduates scattered all over the world what we are today.
All roads lead to CIM on Dec. 2-8 when we come home to a place where we spent time as struggling medical students all poised to become the doctors that we’ve always wanted to be. We gather around CIM for this significant moment, this time more wise mentally and more mature physically. But in the eyes of our classmates and friends, we will always be the same guys and gals of decades past. Nothing has changed except that we have become better persons as children of God, as doctors, as parents, or as senior citizens.
On this very important milestone, we pay tribute to our beloved teachers for making us what we are today. It was such a long, winding and hard climb to the medical world. It was not a walk in the park.
Medicine is undeniably one such profession that requires long years of study, aside from the tedious and rigid academic and clinical training one has to go through before one can finally be considered a full-fledged doctor.
Many times in our life as medical students, we had to choose between night life and staying home to study for the exams the next day. Indeed, there’s no short cut to becoming a doctor. As medical students, we went through a lot of stress, anxiety, burnout and fatigue due to a long list of exams to hurdle so we could graduate.
Truly, the road to becoming a physician is long and arduous. To become a physician, one has to spend eight years in med school after high school graduation. That’s around age 17, granting that one entered Grade one at age seven; so by the time one finishes medical studies, one is already 25 years old. There’s one-year postgraduate internship, plus three years residency training (some fields of specialization require four or five, minus the subspecialty fellowship). One is 29 years old by then.
A doctor will always be a student. Medical science is such a dynamic field.
What’s true and applicable now may not be so in the next four or five years. For a physician, the learning never ends. It is a process.
This once-in-a-lifetime 50th anniversary is geared towards fellowship and camaraderie. We bring back our yesteryears: sharing five decades of our joy, our fun, and our seasons in the sun; to sing and dance, to laugh and to thank God Almighty for giving us the privilege of reaching this far.
Thank you, Lord, for the gift of life and friendship. It’s nice to be back to a place where we have been, where we belong, and one we call home.
