How I Became a Physical Therapist

July 29, 2022

How I Became a Physical Therapist

You think I liked being a PT? The road that led me here was purely accidental. I did not see myself as a physical therapist. At all. How could I be? I was cachectic and malnourished. My patients would not probably believe my capabilities as a therapist because I looked in worse shape than them.

Before I reached this stage in my life, which I would call a personal achievement, I had to endure many years of self-doubt and questioning. It was not all roses for me. Up to this point, the path can still be thorny, but I have grown to love and embrace this road and I will probably walk on it until I could not anymore. I like to profess that I have found some sense of fulfillment in what I do. And I would also like to think that I have reached a point in my life when I can say that this is what I was meant to do.

It wasn’t a walk in the park, as I have said. When I left the seminary, I was lost. I did not have any back up plans because all I wanted to do was escape from that place. I was young and impulsive, and I admit that I did not think it through. Not that the decision to leave was wrong, I just did it without having any options. So I ended up being stuck in the middle of nowhere after I closed that door to priesthood. Real life kind of gave me an ultimatum: six months. It was a short period by Western standards but in Filipino time, it was like wasting precious hours of your life of not doing anything. That was a big no-no in our culture. We did not allow any time for self-reflection or “figuring things out” before deciding on what we wanted in life. After high school, we should know our direction as an adult, no lollygagging or skipping cobblestones. We were obligated to bring our family out of poverty. That was (and probably still is) the notion why we had to make things happen. I say six months because it was the only amount of time that I had in my hands to pick a college I wanted to go to, take the admissions tests, pass it and enroll in a program that I probably half-like. The pressure to become an adult became real and I think I was not ready. But I was forced to be ready.

I considered being a dentist for a hot second. The reason being was that I admired the handicraft work that my dentist did on my set of choppers- how he re-aligned everything in a small amount of time which made my smile one of the (ehem) best assets that I could be proud of. Prior to that, my fangs looked hideous. They looked like underdeveloped seeds growing out of my purple gums, an adolescent vampire with yellow hues for its teeth. Dreadful.

But becoming a dentist would take me up to 6 years to complete the program, and the tuition was crazy expensive, short of selling my soul to the devil.

Then a high school classmate talked me (and my mother) into becoming a physical therapist. I had no idea what that was. It was very foreign to me and the concept of it all seemed novel and new. My classmate told me that this was the hot ticket to the US, the greener pasture that most medical professionals dreamed of. I think that it became my ultimate goal in life at that point- study, work abroad and become rich. It did not matter if I liked being a PT, heck I didn’t even know what PT’s did, the only important thing was getting a job in the States and start earning dollars.

It's sad to admit that most Filipino college students, at least during that time, had this notion that the only way to make a decent living was to go overseas. Isn’t it sad to hear that our country was making a living out of its people- exporting manpower to save the economy, uprooting mothers and fathers out of their families and transplanting them into a foreign place to find a decent paying job because back home they could not get compensated sufficiently no matter how hard they killed themselves working? In the years that I was employed in the Philippines, I have not made enough savings to feed a family, sadly. That was the gist of the economic situation back home: you go abroad to have a decent life, then accept it as your own fate. I was one of them. It was not pretty, but we survived.

After a little convincing and “sales talk”, I gave in and applied to three universities with a PT program. Back there, getting into PT school was not really as hard as getting to the same program here in the US. In the Philippines, as long as you pass the tests and pay the tuition, you can become whatever you want. The weeds would eventually be filtered out throughout the course of the program.

I did pass the test of the three universities I applied for. I chose the cheapest one because we were poor. We were supposed to be scholars in that University but many of my classmates had money. But I don’t think money could make us pass our exams, we had to use some brains apparently, and at the same time, be good on our skills in order to maintain our status as “scholars”. I reviled the part where I had to use my brains because I was lazy if circumstances allowed me to be.

During our first year, I think there were 500 of us taking the course (PT was that prolific and popular, everyone wanted to go the States). At the end of our sophomore year, we were supposed to take a grueling exam we called “The Battery Test”. As for the reason why it was called as such, my theory was to depolarize the whole batch and sift half of its population to kingdom come. I was part of the half who survived, obviously. I also heard a rumor that I placed 5^th in the test. A friend of mine saw a “list of the top 20 who made the cut” and told me that I was one of them. I did not believe him as I knew that that I was not a good test taker because nerves got into me and I always overcomplicate a simple answer.

I never really found out the truth behind the top 20 list and I really doubted its veracity because I was never good in class- I was barely surviving. In fact, I did not understand half of the lecture because my mind could not accept the fact that it could hold so much information in a span of three years and retain it forever as part of one’s daily consciousness. I was convinced that there was no way a human brain could learn all the different cells in the body, the names of medicines and its pharmacokinetics, the origin, insertion, action of the muscles or enumerate the Kreb cycle without going into convulsions as it was humanely impossible for my (lazy) brain.

Anyway, I was just a warm body when I was in PT school, I was barely making any waves in the academics because I felt I was stuck (again) in a situation that I barely knew about. I picked this path because it was the popular choice. I did not want to waste my life a third time changing to another program because I was already invested too far in this field and might as well stick to it until the end.

But before our clinical rotation, I got so scared of immersing my foot into the real world. I seriously felt that I was not ready and could not handle a patient safely. I felt that the activities we undertook in the lab and the practical exams we had to endure were not enough to prepare me in seeing an actual patient. I felt that I would kill a human being. I became very aware that I was responsible for any outcome a person would have under my own wing. It was like having wedding jitters without actually getting married. But once I got over that hurdle, which I knew I had to face eventually, I found something different and exceptional in the field I chose as my profession. Instead of having a mind set of “I might kill this person”, my frame of mind became “I can make a difference in this person’s life”. And I think that changed my whole perspective in becoming a part of the PT world.

When I graduated, the market was over-populated by therapists. I did not see that coming. By the time we took our boards, the nursing profession became the new hot ticket to greener pastures as most countries were looking for them. The new PTs became the unpaid, overworked, volunteers manning the hospitals and clinics because they needed experience for jobs that did not hold any certainty of employment. I was out of school and unemployed for two years.

When your mind is stagnant and unstimulated, you become stupid and lazy. That’s how I was for two years. I even considered taking units to become a nurse because the demand was so high and I needed to earn money. But I did not want to make the same mistake again of having to finish a program only to end up being unemployed. I made the decision to volunteer in a hospital just to force my brain to think clinical again. It was hard because I was not earning anything and at the same time I was still depending on my parents for financial support at an age when I should be embarrassed about asking for financial support.

Being a volunteer taught me a lot of things. You get to provide professional services without asking for anything in return. It humbles you because it is true service. I admire the people who do it for a long time because it shows dedication and professional commitment.

The universe was kind to me. The hospital I volunteered for offered me a job to become a part of its staff. And my life changed.

Everything made sense. It had purpose. The things I’ve learned in school fell right into place. Every cell in the body; every origin, insertion and action of each muscle; the way the brain works and the mind thinks; the way the heart beats; the way babies crawl and stroke patients walk; the paralyzed legs becoming not a distraction but a challenge- all these things made me realize that my brain was not that tiny to hold so many information, and that the new things I learned could still fit in my mind and form new memories and make it as part of my consciousness.

After many years of being lost, I found my compass. It led me to a place where I am content, fulfilled and happy. All the years that did not make sense to me somehow became integral to what I am today. And this is how I became a physical therapist- from being a doubtful eighteen -year-old dreamer wanting to become rich, to someone who thinks being rich is going through all of these things: not regretting the mistakes he committed but celebrating the small successes along the way. Just like that time when he was told he placed 5^th in “The Battery Test” or that single memorable instance when he made an amputee transfer to the wheelchair independently for the very first time.

January 16, 2022