My late grandmother Pearla was a doctor. I remember weekends visiting her clinic in Makati – cream white walls with a single painting, plain and unassuming furniture. The reception and waiting area a wide, well-lit space with magazines, the lab and radiology room smaller and darker, and my lola’s clinic – cold enough as one imagines doctor’s offices back in the 90’s.

She trained as an obstetrician-gynecologist and eventually limited her clinic time to office hours, enough time to tell me stories of diwatas, tikbalangs, and giants of all sorts at night. Fast forward decades later, I am now a resident doctor in General Surgery undergoing my nth year of training. The widest room I’ve seen was the lobby of a private hospital. Our operating room theatres are temperate at best, if the aircon were functioning during the time of your procedure. The hours run short at 24 and long at anything beyond that. Longer if you have a backlog case due to multiple factors (no relatives, no materials, broken anesthesia machine, no slot available in the operating theater, etc). It varies per institution.

Later on, my lola would tell me that she had cancer. Not just any cancer, but a type of lymphoma that rose up from the immunosuppressive drugs she had to take to keep her transplanted kidney alive. It has been sixteen years since her death and I still cannot bring myself to review her records. Losing a loved one is funny. It breaks you up and still you remain, while the person you love is no longer there.

I started writing poetry as a means to cope with the sadness of losing my late lola. It was understandably horrible at first, like any child’s first drafts. Then I started reading – initially Keats (piqued after watching Bright Star), then Rosetti and Yeats. I took an elective class on writing poetry under Larry Ypil in my last year of college (the lone Bio major in the room) and from there I learned about Louise Gluck, Robert Hass, Lee-Young Li, and even the poetry of Yoko Ono.

I had read that to be a good writer one needed to read, and so that I did. Being a science major obsessed with to-do lists made it easier for me to meet deadlines. By my first year of med school, I had participated in three national writing workshops. I treated each of these workshops as vacations from the doctorly life. Each time I’d get back, my med school friends were always keen to hear stories of what exactly writers did during these workshops.

Again and again I go back to the idea of pursuing creativity not through inspiration, but through discipline. I’ve found that it’s a function less of talent, and more of the effort one places in pursuit of. As with maintenance medications, creativity, requires a consistent dosage and enough discipline in order to thrive in its potency.

The same things I use in my surgical training, I use in my writing practice. To write, I read a slew of works to get me started – these can be poems, articles, or whatever gets my mind at ease. At the start of every month, I list down deadlines for journals that interest me. I work around this with the deadlines required in my general surgery training curriculum (exams, conferences, and presentations). These are listed both in my laptop and in a notebook – I tend to forget which works I send out to where, hence the list. I also keep an updated list of which poems are unpublished and could still be sent out, and I rank them via different highlighter colors. It’s the same way I study for my exams – I use seven different highlighters and each color indicates definition, treatment, contraindication/side effect, etc. The devil is in the details.

Community is also a big factor in keeping the pace – I have groups of people whom I write with and who give me recommendations on which new works to read. I am also lucky that my bosses at work are open minded enough to let me pursue writing and attend certain book launches or open mics, despite the weight of training. People will ask “Where do you find the time?” Sometimes when there isn’t as many consults during duty, I find the time to write.

Really, it’s less of finding time but instead, making time. I always tell aspiring doctors (eyes still gleaming with optimism) that training for a subspecialty in The Philippines is no walk in the park. In the words of the late Paul Kalanithi, “Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills, when the difference between tragedy and triumph was defined by one or two millimeters.” It’s not easy –yet some of us manage to make time for lives outside the scalpel and stethoscope. Where others in training might prefer the solace of sleep and rest, I find my comfort in writing.

I remember my lola and how much she had encouraged me to enjoy my life – enjoy reading, enjoy art, enjoy weekends. I like to see these as less of “hobbies” (some doctors play sports, others DJ, brew coffee, ride bikes, draw and paint) and more of as things that allow us to help make sense of the chaos of the human body – of the human condition – which we encounter every day.

How else to break bad news to our patients without breaking down ourselves? How else to get through as witnesses to dying and death on a daily basis?

Alyza Taguilaso is a resident doctor training in General Surgery. Her work has been shortlisted for a Rhysling Award and other contests like the Manchester Poetry Prize and Bridport Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in several publications, including Electric Literature, Crazy Horse, The Deadlands, Canthius, Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Orbis Journal, and Voice and Verse, among others. You may find her online via Wordpress (@alyzataguilastorm), Instagram (@ventral), and twitter/X (@lalalalalalyza).