I was in the middle of a clinical rotation when it happened, and nothing about that moment felt like I had imagined it would.
I’m RKD, and I live in Cebu City. If you asked me what I do day to day, I’d tell you honestly: I sleep. Life as a nursing student is a strange rhythm, the hours are long, the exhaustion is real, and rest becomes something you protect fiercely whenever you can find it. But then there are the clinical rotations, and those are a completely different world. The moment I step into that environment something in me wakes up in a way that sleep never quite does.
The first time I assisted in delivering a baby, I didn’t have time to think about whether I was doing it right. There was just the moment, and what it asked of me, and then suddenly there was a new person in the world who wasn’t there before. I remember the weight of that. Not just physically but in some other way I still don’t fully have words for. It was the first time I understood that what I was training for wasn’t just a degree. It was something I was going to carry for the rest of my life whether I was ready or not.
I don’t talk much about the hard parts of getting here. The exhaustion, the doubt, the days when the gap between where I am and where I want to be feels impossibly wide. There are days when I wonder if I’m moving in the right direction, or if I’m just moving because stopping feels worse. I don’t think that feeling ever fully goes away. But the rotations pull me back every time. Being in that space does something to me that nothing else quite replicates.
What keeps me going is a dream to become a doctor. I know how that sounds, clean and simple, like something you’d write on a scholarship application. But I mean it in a quieter way than that. It’s not about the title. It’s about what the title would allow me to do, how many more moments like that delivery room I would get to be inside of, how many times I would get to be the person who showed up when someone needed it most. Nursing school is where I am. Medicine is where I’m pointing myself.
I like to think that what I do has already helped someone, even in a small way. I can’t always know for sure. That’s something you learn to sit with in this field, the uncertainty of impact, the fact that you give what you have and then let go. But I carry the hope that something I did mattered to someone, even if I never find out how.
“I feel most alive when I help someone.”
When was the last time you did something that made you feel genuinely necessary to someone else?
Every life has a story worth telling. Thank you for reading this one.
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