On the brink

I’m on my second to last (penultimate, what a great word) rotation and I’m in the Oregon Burn Center at Emanuel hospital. I have lots to say about this wonderful rotation but I feel it is prudent to let a little time go past before I start talking about it. Because I am finding it is useful to have some distance from the events, in order to honor the confidentiality of my patients and some of the things I have seen are not finished yet. One thing I will say about burn medicine is that you have longitudinal relationships with your patients. Personally, it’s been a roller coaster of a week, dealing with some family & med school excitement. That’s where we will point the spotlight today.

My mom and stepmom take one big trip every year. This year they are taking my 13 year old son, Duncan, with them to New Zealand & Australia. Yesterday I took D to the airport and he made his way down to LAX to mee tup with my parents. This is a wonderful exciting adventure and I’m so grateful to my parents for making it happen. As you can imagine, it took some doing to get him ready for the trip. Packing, updating devices, downloading new music, convincing him he needs more than 1 pair of shoes. You know, normal stuff. As I write this, it is a little after 9:00 a.m. tomorrow for them and they are probably exhausted and jet lagged in their Auckland hotel. I wonder what the future looks like for them.

In my own life, I am seeing a culmination of nearly 7 years of planning and effort, from that random Wednesday afternoon when I thought, “huh, maybe I could go to medical school,” to today, when my attending introduced me to a patient as Dr. Guran. On Monday morning at 8:00 I got a short, very sweet email from the National Residency Match Program telling me that I have matched. Because I only ranked OB/GYN programs, I now know that I am going to become an Obstetrician Gynecologist! In a separate post, I will share why this has not been a foregone conclusion in my life but for now just trust me, this is a really big deal. No fair saying “I knew it would go this way!” because odds are good you don’t know the whole story. I’m matched, it wasn’t a guarantee, I’m relieved. Very relieved!

Tomorrow I will find out WHERE my family & I will be going for the next 4 years. It may seem odd to tell us “matched” but not “where” and I’m sure if we were creating a process from scratch, we could come up with a better system. However, the reason for this limbo time is that there are about 5% of medical students around the country who heard “not matched” on Monday morning. These students have this week to apply to a supplemental matching program that will, hopefully, give them good news that they can share with the rest of us on Friday. Previous to this structure, everyone found out “matched/where” and “not matched” at the same time and they literally called the process after that day “The Scramble”. So this is better.

Tomorrow at 0900 PDT medical students all over the country will be given envelopes that contain their fate. I’m looking forward to sharing that news with you all very soon!