What an Empty Bottle Could Buy | Cheryl Dueñas, CPUCN Class 1993

When Cheryl Dueñas remembers her childhood, she can still see the empty soft drink bottles sitting on her teachers’ desks. To someone else, they were already finished with, nothing more than glass waiting to be thrown away. But Cheryl knew the bottles could be returned to the school canteen for their deposit. She would gather them, carry them downstairs and exchange them for a few coins. Those coins bought her a small snack.

Long before she learned the language of patient safety, infection prevention or healthcare systems, Cheryl had already learned to notice what others overlooked. She knew how to look at something seemingly empty and find what could still be useful.

She had to. Cheryl was the eldest of six children growing up in Javellana, Jaro, Iloilo City. There were no textbooks of her own and little money for anything beyond what was absolutely necessary. She studied from whatever she could borrow or find. In high school, she walked long distances carrying candies and sheets of paper that she would sell to classmates the next morning. She was still a child, but she was already learning how to provide.

Yet hardship did not make her retreat from school life. She became a consistent honor student, a CAT officer and a student writer. She stepped into leadership early, first as the inaugural Sangguniang Kabataan chairperson of Barangay Javellana and later as president of the Iloilo League of Youth in Jaro District. But beneath the achievements was a simpler truth: Cheryl was the eldest.

In many Filipino families, that position comes with an understanding no one needs to put into words. You go first. You find the way. Then, if you can, you turn around and help the others follow.

That was the future Cheryl carried with her when she entered the CPU College of Nursing. The money she received was enough for her jeepney fare. Everything else had to be figured out, so she figured it out. She used library books, borrowed notes, counted every centavo and learned to live without the extras that might have made nursing school easier. She attended classes, completed clinical duties and held tightly to the reason she was there. Finishing nursing school was not simply her own dream. Somewhere behind every examination and every duty were five younger siblings whose chances might depend, at least partly, on hers.

At CPU, she also found a place where the writer in her could live. She joined The Pacemaker, the official student publication of the College of Nursing, and eventually became its associate editor. There is something fitting about that journey:

The girl who once sold sheets of paper was now helping fill them with stories.

Cheryl graduated with her Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 1993 and passed the Philippine Nursing Licensure Examination. But a license did not instantly produce the life she had worked toward. For several months, she worked as a secretary collecting payments from fruit stand vendors. She later volunteered at Iloilo Mission Hospital for three months before obtaining a casual nursing position with the Iloilo City Health Office, where she was assigned to three barangays in La Paz.

She had finally begun working as a nurse, but one salary was not enough. Two of her younger siblings needed help with school expenses, which meant Cheryl’s working day did not end when she left the health office. From seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, she worked as a public health nurse. By four, she had to be at Jollibee, where she worked as a store marketing assistant and crew member until midnight. On weekends, that second shift could begin at six in the morning and continue until midnight.

There was almost no life left between one uniform and the next. No leisurely dinner. No long evening to recover. No guarantee of enough sleep before morning came and someone needed her again. Patients needed her at the health office. Customers and coworkers expected her at Jollibee. At home, younger siblings were waiting for their own opportunity to finish school.

It is tempting, from a safe distance, to call that season inspiring. Living it must have been exhausting. Cheryl was paying for other people’s futures with hours of her own life that she could never get back. When she became tired or discouraged, she thought about her brothers and sisters. Carrying them was also what carried her.

Perhaps that is the clearest way to understand Cheryl. Nursing did not suddenly teach her how to care for people. Nursing gave a name and a direction to something she had already been doing most of her life.

Her career eventually took her far beyond those first three barangays. She worked in clinical research with Johns Hopkins University in the Visayas. In 2003, she entered Western Visayas Medical Center as a postgraduate practitioner and, beginning as Nurse I, worked her way through increasing levels of responsibility. In 2006, after training with the UP National Poison Control Center, she became a Certified Clinical Toxicology Nurse and the first Clinical Nurse Toxicologist in Western Visayas. She later earned her Master of Arts in Nursing, receiving the Leadership Award from Philippine Christian University.

As her career grew, her work increasingly seemed to return to a question she had been answering since childhood:

What is missing, and what can I do about it?

In 2018, Cheryl founded Infection Prevention and Control Iloilo, bringing infection-control nurses from across Iloilo City and the province into one network where they could share what they knew, strengthen one another and improve standards of care across their institutions. She did not keep what she had learned to herself. She built the support system she knew people needed.

Today, as Supervising Safety Nurse V at Western Visayas Medical Center, Cheryl works to prevent the failures that can harm patients and healthcare workers. She develops safety protocols, leads patient-safety initiatives and mentors nurses who will one day assume the work after her. For Cheryl, safety is not paperwork. It is the promise behind every hospital admission: that the person entrusted to your care should have the best possible chance of returning home to the people who love them.

Her work has earned significant recognition, including The Outstanding Woman of Iloilo City in the Professional Category, the WVMC Nursing Excellence Award, the Tatak Centralian Nurse Award and, in 2025, Asia’s Pinnacle Award for Excellence in Infection Prevention and Control. The awards matter. They tell us that others have seen the value of her work. But they are not the heart of her story.

The heart of Cheryl’s story is still the eldest daughter who worked until midnight so another child could remain in school. It is the nurse who kept learning because her patients deserved better and the mentor who feels her work has mattered whenever a young nurse she taught steps forward with confidence.

Perhaps it is most visible in what happened inside her own family. The girl who once went to school without her own textbooks now has an eldest daughter who graduated magna cum laude and is studying medicine. Her second daughter graduated cum laude in Nursing and is preparing for the PNLE. Her older son is studying Nursing at CPU, while her youngest is already serving as a student leader. Education, once so difficult for Cheryl to reach, now runs through the next generation of her family, not because the road became easy, but because she kept clearing it.

If Cheryl could speak to the young nursing student she once was, she would not tell her to forget the difficult years. She would tell her:

“Keep walking. Collect those bottles, sell those candies, and write those stories for The Pacemaker. Don’t worry about what you lack today. Every sacrifice you are making is building the resilience, wisdom, and strength you will need to lead, pioneer, and uplift thousands of nurses and patients in the future.”

Perhaps that is why the image of those empty bottles has stayed with her. A bottle on a teacher’s desk. A few coins in a young girl’s hand. A small snack bought with something another person no longer needed. It did not look like much, but that child was already becoming the woman who would spend her life looking for what others missed, making something useful from what was available and creating safer paths for the people coming behind her.

She once carried bottles so she could feed herself. Later, she carried her siblings toward an education. Today, she carries responsibility for the safety of patients, the growth of younger nurses and the future of a profession she has served for more than three decades.

That is the light she carries.