Hello I’m Macoy.
Macoy is, ironically, my professional name. Before residency, there were probably only two people who actually called me that. Then I had to get my name embroidered on my residency white coat. It cost ₱9 per letter, and I realized it would be cheaper if I used a nickname I barely used.
So I did. And that was basically how I became Macoy.
People who knew me before residency would occasionally hear someone call me that and look confused, like, Who is he? People who met me after residency, meanwhile, would be like, Who is Mark?
I’m an obstetric anesthesiologist, which means I spend a considerable portion of my life behind a surgical drape, keeping people alive while pretending the alarm that just went off is completely normal.
When I’m not doing that, I teach medicine, go to the gym, drink too much coffee, talk to my cat, and spend an unreasonable amount of time deciding whether something deserves to be added to cart.
I was diagnosed with depression in 2018. It has relapsed a few times since then.
Most of the time, you probably wouldn’t know. I still go to work. I teach. I see patients. I answer messages. I buy groceries. I complain about things on the internet. Life continues looking remarkably ordinary even when, internally, it doesn’t feel ordinary at all.
Writing became one of the ways I deal with that. Not everything I write is about depression. In fact, most of it isn’t. Sometimes I’m writing about my mother. Sometimes medicine. Sometimes grief. Sometimes a friend. Sometimes a stranger. Sometimes I have apparently spent enough time thinking about a coffee grinder that it now requires its own essay. But writing forces me to take whatever has been circling inside my head and put it somewhere else for a while.
Sometimes I understand it better afterward.
Sometimes I just make it funny.
Both help.
This is not really a medical blog, although medicine inevitably wanders in. So do family, grief, friendship, adulthood, and things I probably shouldn’t have bought, and strangers who become fully developed characters in my head five minutes after meeting them.
I write mostly about ordinary things because ordinary things have an annoying habit of becoming something else. A song becomes my father. An ugly shower curtain becomes my mother. A coffee grinder becomes an argument about money, memory, and the person I used to be. A completely normal social interaction becomes a six-scene movie in my head, usually with inappropriate casting and a soundtrack nobody asked for.
Sometimes the stories are funny. Sometimes they aren’t. Most of the time I try to be funny anyway.
I like people who are contradictions, probably because I am one.
I enjoy nice things but remain irrationally cheap about very specific things. I like being alone but occasionally wonder why everyone has left me alone. I make decisions under pressure for a living but can spend three days choosing a household appliance. I am sentimental but deeply suspicious of sentimentality. And despite being a physician trained to interpret complicated physiological information, I remain remarkably capable of overinterpreting ordinary human behavior.
There is also Zekie, my cat, who contributes very little financially but maintains considerable influence over household policy.
I’ve been writing on and off for years. Mostly because apparently experiencing something once is insufficient. I also have to replay it in my head, give everyone dialogue, reconsider what happened, make fun of myself, and eventually turn it into a story.
If there is a theme here, I suppose it is this:
Life rarely looks important while it is happening.
Usually it looks like coffee, dinner, work, traffic, groceries, an old song, something stupid somebody said, or an object you’ve walked past a hundred times.
Then one day it reminds you of someone.
And suddenly you’re writing about it.
Welcome to Ether Diaries.
Controlled breaths. Uncontrolled thoughts.
