The view from ZSR 6th floor on the eve of the rest of my life…

7 years is a long time.

I am sitting curled up in one of my favorite places in the world. The ZSR library on the Wake Forest ugrad campus. Its nooks and crannies and huge windows and high callings have facilitated my studies, my imagination and my dreams for the past 7 years.  It was here I studied for my first real exam EVER, memorized latin poetry, poured over novels, drew out organic mechanisms, took MCAT practice tests, discovered libreation theology, painstaking dissected the New Testament and the Koran and eastern European folklore. I learned EKGs and neuroanatomy on the 6th floor. I learned Rheumatology and Endocrinology over in the new wing.  I dreamed of traveling and medical school and later medical missions.  And like most young women day dreamed occasionally about boys and the future and all that is to come.  This place is full of friendly ghosts that remind me of where I have been, who I am and where I am going. Its not just nostalgia and books that live here but a sliver of my identity and the woman I have become will always find a home here.  Of all the places on the Wake Forest campus I think its the place i will miss the most when I finally physically leave Winston in May.

And that is about to come to a head. Tomorrow it begins.  I submit to the powers that be my residency application. Countless cups of tea, late nights, long hours, books, papers, notebooks, itunes, sutures, progress notes and surgeries.  seven years, six pages of resume and essay, five agonizing standardized board/admission exams, four summers loving Eastern Europe and four babies delivered, three years of med school (1 to go), 1.5 degrees, it all been for tomorrow so I can go get a job somewhere in the United States that wants a gimpy pediatrician to be with a strange love for all things from the Black Sea to the North Pole, a more than passionate obsession with disability rights who is in love with children, Jesus and comparative religion.

up, up and away.