Hurricane Jill

In the red

I haven’t spoken to my brother yet, but it’ll probably work out like this: he pays for my dad’s care, and I owe him half once I finish residency.

Honestly, I’m in so much debt already that it doesn’t even matter.

Tulane: $40,000/yr; the University of Google: free

Call me a dork, but I decided to google “why people get angry.” Google came up with this as the top link. Not sure what to think about that.

SAT analogy…money : resident :: _____ : turnip.

Right now I’m waiting for my landlord’s repairman to arrive with my new washing machine. He was supposed to be here at 1pm, and in about 5 minutes I’m going to call and ask where he is. In the meantime I’ll write a bit.

Last night my brother called, congratulating me on my residency match. Then he asked me to call him regarding the $6000 he’s spent since January paying for my dad’s assisted living home. It sounded like, “great, you have a job, now you can help me pay these bills.” But I’m not sure he understands what I’m getting paid next year. He’s making easily three times what I’ll be making as a resident. And my rent will cost me as much as his mortgage is costing him. He has two cars, a boat, no remaining student loan debt and a boatload of money in savings. Meanwhile I could buy a very nice house with the amount of money I owe in student loans, and my residency stipend is just enough to survive on, and not enough to pay any of my debt back. And I bet he’s going to ask me to help pay dad’s expenses. {eye roll} gotta love the bro.

Woohoo, that was the repairman on the phone. They’re just down the street and will be here momentarily. More later.

Invitatus Es

In the mail today, I received an invitation to this spring’s Friar Weekend at UT. The timing of the weekend is uncharacteristically good this year–right before our spring break. It’s also a little unusual that I actually got an invitation. After I moved to New Orleans, I would get them only haphazardly, and there’d been none since Katrina. I don’t actually need one, since as a Friar I have a standing invite to all their functions. But there are certain Friars who will never actually be invited to function, and I was beginning to wonder if I had become one of them.

Anyway, I may go. The spring Weekend is when they announce the winner of the Centennial Teaching Fellowship, which is worth a cool $10,000 for the winner. I’ve been on the selection committee a few times, and it always cracks me up how the bigwigs at UT nominate all these professors with impressive CVs, and completely neglect to consider their actual teaching skills. So we sift through literally hundreds of CVs, each one at least a score of pages long, if not two or three. But in the end the award always goes to someone who’s an outstanding teacher, and the judgment is based on our own observation of them teaching. Often the person also has an impressive amount of university service and a number of publications as well, but that’s only because of the value placed on it by most of the people making nominations.

It’s easy to teach well when you’re teaching to straight-A students. They make even the awful professors look competent at teaching. But I think the mark of a truly good teacher is when their C students are also performing like A students; understanding the difficult concepts, getting the tough questions right on the exam, being able to explain a concept to their friends or apply it correctly in a different context.

In fact, it was one of the award finalists who explained to me how the P450 enzymes work, and it was that explanation that enabled me to make the connection that got me interested in my research project. It’s over ten years later, and still every time I think about the topic, it’s that explanation that makes it understandable.

So I like to hear who wins each year, because even now it’s often someone I know. Also I like to hear what all the people I knew then are up to now. The Friars are basically the has-beens of campus politics, and most of them had political aspirations of some sort or another. But I hate going to those things alone. However, it’s slightly less desperate to go alone than to bring a random date, so alone it is…

Instrument-rated

So of the two programs listed, I knew already that one of them was not real. So I called the other one this morning and was told that the other program had also matched all their spots. Since I called at 11:04, I seriously doubt that they filled via the scramble.

It was hard to watch all those spots get filled in the other specialties while my own future remains so uncertain. I do hate uncertainty with a passion. And the cumulative events of these last two years have taxed all the reserves I have for dealing with it. So I spent much of the morning trying to picture myself as a resident in anesthesia, neurology, psychiatry, radiology, pediatrics, even medicine. But there truly is not anything else I can see myself doing for more than a year or two. Well, let me qualify that–nothing I can see myself enjoying. Certainly there are things I can do, and do well. And there’s always some enjoyment in simply being good at what you’re doing. But it’s not enough to sustain a career, without some intrinsic enjoyment of the field itself. Perhaps I’ll change my mind over this next year, but somehow I doubt it.

I’m a planner. I have plans on every time horizon imaginable. One year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, even thirty years ahead. The plans are always flexible–I know better than to expect things to go perfectly. In fact, changes in the plan don’t bother me at all. It’s being unable to plan in the first place that drives me crazy. And I tend to drive other people crazy when it gets like that in my life.

So right now I just have to trust that I’m on the right course. I can’t actually see the way ahead, which is certainly distressing, but I’ve made a plan that should get me to my goal.

And so this morning, with some effort, I closed the scramble list and went on with my day.

Did I Match?

Yes, I did. I matched a prelim year in general surgery, which is all that I applied for through ERAS. I listed an advanced position as well, just so that I would have access to the scramble list. But I’m on the fence as to whether I should go in tomorrow and try to scramble for something. There are supposedly 2 unfilled neurosurgery spots, but I seriously doubt those are real. They’re probably just an oversight–some program that matched through SF Match and forgot to cancel their eligibility through NRMP.

In any event, there’s not a lot of suspense regarding where I matched. I only ranked three programs, so it’s either MGH, UCSF or University of Washington (listed alphabetically, not necessarily in rank order). And the program I ranked #1 told me they were ranking me #1, so I’ll be surprised if I matched elsewhere. I ranked it #1 because the program director promised to give me 2 early neurosurgery rotations and to treat me the same as their categorical residents, and to actively support my search for a neurosurgery residency if I worked hard and was a good intern. And my gut told me I could trust the PD’s word.

Even so, it was awful trying to decide how to rank them. No matter what order I put them in, I had this completely irrational feeling that I was making a horrible mistake. But I could only choose from among the options before me, so there was no way around it. I certified my list at 7:59pm central time–one minute before the deadline. So I literally could not have waited one minute longer.

Objectively speaking, I really couldn’t have gone wrong no matter what order I ranked them. However, having a supportive PD is worth its weight in gold, and in the end that was the deciding factor.

Medical Marriages

I ran across an interesting presentation on the subject of physician marriages. It lasts about 50 minutes, but the guy is a good speaker so it doesn’t seem that long.

However, hyphenation is still on the table

So, my manuscript was accepted for publication. Hooray! At least that’s one good thing to happen this year.