To Marcy

I feel I owe you an entire post.

Many of my classmates and I from the one national medical school in the Philippines started training in the United States at the peak of the AIDS epidemic. US medical graduates at that time did not want to have anything to do with hundreds of patients with full-blown AIDS. This was our chance to work and learn from outstanding institutions where we trained with physicians who were paid to read, research and teach residents full time.

Those were great days and those were days before they began limiting work hours of residents. 120 hours a week was not uncommon and imagine King's County Hospital with 1000 medical beds (including a 40 bed prison ward). One memory from this period was the experience of not seeing daylight for weeks on end as we would report for work early in the morning and return home late at night. I don't know how we thrived in these circumstances but having my wife with me as a co-resident surely helped a lot.

Maybe this is also why I am confident Chris will appreciate our working environment today.