chugging along

Well, I have nothing new to really report. I now have a total of five interviews for emergency medicine from here to Michigan. I also have a local one for preliminary surgery locally. I have heard that there are a record number of Emed applications this year. This is bad news for me. I am praying that I get in somewhere. I have to start thinking about contingency plans, and, as a point of fact, I already have. My fallback plan is to do a preliminary surgery year. Surgery is a five year residency- almost twice as long as Emed. I figure that if I do not get into Emed this year, I will go into a pre-Surg year. Then, I will reapply again next year with another year of training under my belt. If I stil cannot get into Emed at that point, then I will just have to "settle" for being a surgeon. The good news is that if I do go into surgery, one of the years of residency is a "research" year. This means that you get paid to do "research." It turns out that this includes going through the aforementioned GEMSS program. So, I would basically spend one of the five years doing tactical medicine. Ththe other four years would be hard, but then again, surgeons make more than emergency physicians, so I guess I could suffer that part well enough. Still I really do want to go into Emergency medicine, but I while I hope for the best, I must plan for the worst.

So far, the tally is:

Number of programs applied to:               78

Number of interviews offered:                     6

Number of interviews accepted:                 6

Number of applications rejected:               33

Number of applications pending:              39

I also had a unique experience with this: a classmate of mine was despairing the number of rejections he was getting. I asked him how many he had gotten, and he answered "fifteen."

I started laughing and told him that when he had thirty to come talk to me. Anyway, things are going as best as they can, I suppose. In other news, I am doing my anaesthesiology rotation right now. I think I made a pretty good impression on the attending since I answered just about every question he had for me right up until he got into dome of the formulas for calculating pressures. Anyway, I am enjoying this rotation very much so far. I have had pretty good success withintubating patients, even thought the attendings like to give me the fat patients with no neck to tube. I thought they would start me on the easy ones, but nooooo......

Domestic-6 was given an offhanded compliment by one of the residents. You see, my wife is incredibly smart. I mean, she consistently blows the curve on exams medical boards in a language she only started learning a little over thirteen years ago. She is one of those people who can really humble you if she weren't such a self- depracating angel. Anyway, one of the residents, no kidding, started to explain something to me, and then stopped herself with "wait a minute; you're Domestic-6's husband, so of course you already know all of this stuff."

......and I certainly did not.

 Respectfully Submitted,
-doc Russia