Whirlwind

It's a special time of year ... graduations, weddings, and saying goodbye. One week ago I watched my former classmates walk across the Hancher stage and be introduced to the public for the first time as doctors ... a surreal, humbling (perhaps frightening!) experience. Most of my friends are moving away for residency, and while I am sad to see them go, I look forward to crashing on their couches come this fall's residency interview season!






I spent the night out downtown celebrating with my medical school friends, left myself very little time to pack, and was a bit too late in arriving at the airport to catch my 5:00 a.m. DC-bound flight the following morning (as in 4:42 a.m.). I got re-routed through Detroit, ended up meeting my friends John and Gretchen on the connecting flight, and was only twenty minutes late to my friend Ramona's MPH graduation at GWU ... hard to believe that I myself walked across that stage just one year ago! I headed to Washington this past week to attend the American Academy of Family Physicians' Family Medicine Congressional Conference on the Hill --- a great opportunity to network with family doctors who hold health policy interests. I was able to visit my Brazilian friends Lis and Ricardo, celebrate Jen's birthday along with Toby, and enjoy breakfast with my friend Beth ... I love catching up with folks!




Perhaps one of the neatest parts of the trip was my return. While waiting for my flight at National, a Hill staffer paused at each gate in the terminal to announce that a plane full of Nebraska WW II veterans was arriving any minute from Omaha, and she asked us to wait at Gate 8 and give them a warm welcome when they arrived ... the veterans, along with family and friends, were coming to town to visit for their first (and very well likely the last) time the national WW II memorial on the Mall ... usually reserved for a pilot's last flight, two fire trucks powered streams of water over the plane as it pulled in to the gate. I got quite the chuckle as several middle school students started clapping for the young businessmen and families that walked off first --- they just grinned and said the people we were waiting for were a ways behind! The veterans, many wearing decorated hats, were pretty shocked to hear the thunderous applause and shouts of "thank you" and see men and women they had never met salute and extend their hands. Through fairly misty eyes, I managed to snap a picture or two ... and get in my fair share of clapping. I must say, it was pretty awesome.



I returned to cramming for my EKG final (five straight hours of reading EKGs this afternoon!) and have just a two-week radiology clerkship left, and then I am finished with year three! I decided (perhaps unwisely) to take both parts of Step 2 of the Boards in June, a clinical skills "standardized patient" exam in Chicago and a 9-hour computer-based knowledge test. I'm planning an interdisciplinary rural health conference for the last full week in June, and then year four starts in early July ... with that said, I'm signing off blogging until late June (well, at least until my Board exams are finished!). It's time to hunker down and focus in hopes of successfully jumping through a few more hoops in this medical school life of mine ... !