Vision Mission

The first time I learned that people could grow up wanting to become doctors was when my ballerina friend Kei whispered to me, in the middle of a geometry class, that she wanted to become an orthopedic surgeon. A year later and when my hormones had caught up with all of my extracurricular activities (up until then I did not know what I wanted to do so I was on both the cheerdancing and debate teams) and I was in the dermatologist’s office once a week, I knew that I wanted the kind of life she led. The year after that, when my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer (and then my aunt, and then one of my mother’s best friends), I said I wanted to become an oncologist.

4 months into medical school, I fell in love with cardiology because it was the first thing I did on my own. It was the first system I learned the complete physical examination for; the first time I heard the lub-dub beat of a human heart underneath my own stethoschope; and the first time I heard the woosh through a hole in a baby’s chest without a doctor having to tell me it was there. It was the first time a patient told me that I could make a life out of this. It was so easy to fall in love.

Today is 2 years later and all of a sudden I am considering ophthalmology because it was the first thing I did that I thought I could not. I did not expect that seeing into the human eye could be as amazing as listening to a heart beat life.

I did not know that 1.5M Filipinos are blind from bilateral cataracts, of which 100% are treatable, or that some heroes would rather travel the country performing surgeries for free instead of  staying tucked inside hospitals earning a living. I did not expect that it could do the most when it came to public health. It was by far easier to fall in love with that.