Transition State

….What colors do you want your kitchen to be?  Sofa bed or day bed in the office/guest room? Which car insurance agency to do you want?  What is the interest on your student loan?  What is Ohio’s policy on handicapped parking? Have you thought about investments???…

STOP. STOP. STOP.

For just a moment I would like to bask in the moment that I am done with school for all intensive purposes.  Other than three weeks of casual lectures. I am done with medical school.

No more exams, no more adult patients, no more surgery rotations!!!

and now that moment has passed. now we move on to whats really important when you graduate from medical school at 25…becoming an adult.

A real one.

I am bad at it.  For starters…life has been prolonged series of camping trips since well birth…  I go somewhere, I sleep there for a while then I move on. I don’t know what color I want my kitchen or what kind of slip covers I want or where one even really goes to furnish a house… When I imagined myself as a grown up…I imagined a small soviet bloc style apartment or small falling down African house/flat filled with a lot of ethnic art, books, photographs, doctor stuff and stock piled peanut butter in rubber maid containers next to the rubber maid containers of Gideon bibles (in a language that only i speak) and buttons that misguided yet well meaning churches send me and I use as coffee tables. Eventually there will be a husband and kids smooshed in the tiny, tiny flat  too.  I have no idea how to set up house in America especially as a doctor. Apparently doctors are very respectable and have color coordination and matching hand towels. Why didn’t they cover this in medical school?

Insurance…well I have been uninsurable off of my parents’ insurance up to this point. All I know is insurance companies hate me because I was born gimptastic.  There are now like mutliple plans that all cover me now because I have the title of doctor and I work at Childrens.  How do I choose? What’s the difference? Can I just barter brownies for hip x-rays? Is that an option?

Money…never had any of my own…ever.  What little I did have to my name I spend on plane tickets for “camping trips” and food. I have no idea what one does with money that does not go to eating…apparently  one goes to IKEA and buys sofa beds…thats what my Mom said to do.  Then there are taxes and my student loans according to my Dad eats up the rest of it.

Well I have been an adult now for four days. I think I am done. I am ready to retire.

and then my world imploded…

Yesterday my world imploded.
Somewhere in the mist of giving my last lecture to the first years and getting my 5 lb envelope of paperwork from my residency program…it hit me that in 6 weeks my entire world is going to be different….this is what keeps going through my head over and over again…

1. I will be a DOCTOR. No really I will be a D O C T O R. Its not that I can sign all my own orders. Its I HAVE TO SIGN ALL MY OWN ORDERS. I am ultimately responsible for real live children. (ok so yeah I will have back up but seriously I am the person who gets called first….do I really know what to do when some kid is not breathing well or has a seizure or tries to die at 3 AM….)

2.  Every time someone in authority over me at school introduces me these days they say this is Amy she matched at a premier pediatrics program.  Every time they say that I think to my self…HOLY BANANAS.  I am going to be a D O C T O R at a place where all my peers are going to be ridiculously smart and probably know exactly what to do when a kid tries to die at 3 AM and they are on call.  They are also probably AOA (smart, smart med student honor society) and have cured some childhood disease to get in. Basically I am not the brightest crayon in the Wake Forest Box…but in the new box I am going to be surrounded by a LOT OF BRIGHT CRAYONS.

3.  I am a big crayon in the Wake Forest box.  I am not trying to sound arrogant but its true. Everyone knows me because I the only gimpy med student, because I have been here forever, because I give lectures about disability to all the underclassmen, Because I bring back cool pictures from far off lands, because the Dean of Academic Affairs and the Dean of the Faculty like me (because I am the only gimpy med student).  I am going to a place where I will be a very small, very dull crayon.

4. Everyone I regularly rely for support and spend time with is not coming with me and 90% of them won’t be here when I come back to visit. My friends are scattering to the four winds.  I am leaving my family behind as well.

5. I will not have a roommate next year barring divine intervention.  This will be a HUGE adjustment.

6. I am moving somewhere where it SNOWS and I have to get up at 5AM and scrape  my car.

7. I am going to be q 4-5 for 8 freaking months. Will my joints will handle this???  I have no idea. Honestly, what the heck was I thinking? Why could I not be content with some small peds program somewhere with 4-5 months of call as an intern. Why do I have to be so freaking Type A???

8.  Panic…panic…panic….

9. :::intense desire to hide in the tunnels under Wait Chapel and just not graduate:::

10.  Whats the dose of epineprine if my kid tries to die at 3 AM???

:::::Frantically searching for Pediatric Advanced Life Support Book:::