This post is my most-read post ever, on this little blog (which is not saying a lot since I’ve posted maybe 10 times in the last 5 years). Since I published it I’ve received dozens of emails from spouses of medical students who found my blog when conducting a Google search, wondering if they were the only ones who felt alone during this process. Many of them have become pen-pals, either with me, or with each other. Some have asked for a follow-up about residency. This post is for you. You know who you are.
Four years ago we made the trek to Gainesville, Florida. When I thought of Florida before I moved there I conjured images of white beaches, silver buildings with spiny palm trees, and equally, trailer parks and boggy roads - alligators sprinkled throughout. It was far, so far from our home in the rocky mountains. Medical school was a mere 10 hour drive in Arizona, a 1.5 hour flight! A cheap ticket! You hardly needed to prep, just hop on the plane and before you even get your ginger ale no ice, you’re there! We lived away from home but just barely. Florida was another planet as far as I was concerned - the true Wild West, though the irony of that metaphor is not lost on me.
I wrote about the move, four years ago:
"It will start to feel like home," Kevin told me the other night. "I want you to write down how you feel right now about this place, because in four years when it's time to leave, you'll come back and read it, and you'll remember that you can build and rebuild again."
I suppose he's right. We are not perennials, left in the same place to resurface year after year, born new, whole and green. We are transient, moveable. Our bodies tied to one another, tied to survival, scattered across this world that feels at once minuscule and vast.
But the love? At times it hits me that it is the only perennial thing left. A miracle, budding in each new place, with the same people, some new ones too, resurfacing after a long winter.
I had no idea. I had no concept of the ways we build a life in a place that feels as foreign as another country. I wish I could go back and tell myself how when it came time to leave I would wish to write sonnets, love songs to Florida - how sacred that place, and those hours, and those people, most of all, would become to me. But the truth is, at first it felt scary and uncomfortable and somehow annoying, also, as if the entire state was this task I had to check off of my life list. A responsibility as necessary as taking out the trash, paying the electric bill.
~
You receive your matching orders, and you go. Sure, you can submit a rank list - 1-10, or 12, or 15, of where you’d like to go in order. But some algorithm matches you and you are lucky to get a spot and even luckier if it’s the location of your choice. I had friends who got their fourth pick, sixth - even some who got their very last choice. Still, that’s better than having to scramble, which is what happens when you don’t match into any of the places you interviewed and ranked, so you have to try to get in any open position or even change your specialty. I know people who scrambled into something they love though, and others who were set on a specialty and changed two years in.
Florida was our first choice. And still, I felt numb and sad when we received the news. I might have felt that way matching anywhere. It’s an odd feeling to open a slip of paper to see where you will be living for four years, which is why it matters so much that you do your homework on each program and don’t limit it to location. Some programs will work you to the bone. Some will ask you to cheat your numbers (without directly asking you) so that you work more than you report. Some pay for your insurance, some give you a food or housing stipend, some allow you to moonlight. All of these factors should be considered in addition to location - perhaps even more so, because they will affect your life and how often you see your S.O. more than the location itself.
But the match is only the beginning.
~
We moved into a little green house in a beautiful neighborhood. It was the ugliest house for blocks. We signed a four-year rental agreement sight unseen and from the outside it seriously looked haunted. I hated the muggy heat. The landscape that continued as far as your eyes could see, no hills, no mountain view. But that house was a refuge. After four years I know the way the floors feel beneath my bare feet, the small indentation between the island and the couch. The walls are full of holes where I hung art, where the girls crashed their scooters. I hated that dishwasher, the dryer that never seemed to completely dry the clothes in the humidity. The tile that looked dirty no matter how much bleach was used. But I loved 8164 SW too. My books, a rainbow of stories, with its own shelf for library books. The basket of blankets that the girls turned into forts, and picnics and magic carpets. Mostly I loved the sound of the garage door, because that meant Kevin was home.
I spent hours - weeks - months - years alone in that house - okay, alone with my small children, but as any mother can tell you, that is even more difficult than being truly alone most of the time. The good news is that the growth of loneliness already happened in medical school. In this way, residency is easier. You have been missing them for years to their training - it’s more of the same. But this time, you get paid!
A lot of jokes are made about resident salaries. Countless times I heard people complain, saying it wasn’t enough, they are broke, it’s not fair! But here’s the thing - it’s only a low salary because of the hours worked. Otherwise, it’s more than the average American family. After years of paying instead of being paid, the income is a beautiful thing. And it is enough. It is enough. It is enough.
~
Everything grows in Florida. Weeds, mold, lice. At times I felt like the state itself was out to get me. (I can see why prisoners were sent there hundreds of years ago, let’s just say that.) It will rain out of nowhere, blue sky and then BAM, torrential downpour. The heat is sticky and consuming and in October you are still rocking shorts and sandals while the rest of the world transitions to apple cider and sweaters and it is painful in a very first world way.
Hurricane season come then, and you find yourself circling a station you drove 20 minutes to get to because you heard they still had gas but it’s gone now and you just wasted the gas you did have trying to get there. People stock up on bottled water and canned food. You watch the circle of doom approaching you, every day a little closer than the last, and you realize it just has to go through you, that it won’t go away. That the amoeba-looking ring you saw on the news all of those times as a kid actually destroyed homes and livelihoods and even lives. You are one of those people now, and you promise you will never watch the weather without a prayer in your heart for the people on that part of the map.
Lighting strikes more often there than anywhere else. Because, Florida. One Sunday as we ate dinner with friends, the strikes were so loud they shook our house. I panicked, holding the baby, wondering where the safest place to go was. Our router blew up. Our neighbors less than a block away were the unlucky recipients of the direct hit and their entire house burned to the ground within minutes.
Lizards climbed all over my screened porch, and when I caught a sight of them while eating lunch I always lost my appetite. We named the most frequent visitor King Triton. He had a red pouch at his throat that would go in and out, in and out. The cockroaches were less welcome guests, scuttling around at their leisure - once, even, across Kevin’s foot while he fed the baby before bed. I was at a baby shower and heard screams coming from the porch. A massive black snack slithered across someone’s foot. Along the path of our nightly walk there is a house by a pond that is home to legions of frogs at the right time of year, the grass popping, their slimy bodies pumping senselessly.
Consider everything you’ve heard about Florida. It is most likely true.
~
But what no one tells you in a brochure is that beyond the palm trees and the white sand beaches and yes, the swamps and the gators - there is a wild beauty. Because everything grows there, wildflowers scream across the freeway, purple flames as far as the eye can see. The grass is coarse, but green, the water in the sky and the air hydrating the vegetation, and your skin, and your lungs. While my family in Utah was sheltered for what seemed like 6 months of winter, we were going to soccer games with dewy grass, taking long walks without jackets, singing Christmas carols in a wagon with a Santa in short sleeves. Claire went to a summer camp where they decorated visors that said, “God’s Team!” on them and had more diversity in her kindergarten class than I saw my entire K-12.
We took trips all over the state. Moody Jacksonville, Amelia Island, Coconut Point - but mostly we went to Orlando, because if you aren’t a Disney nut before Florida, you will be when you leave. The first year we had season passes we went to Disney World 25 times. Nearly a month of our year. The second year the tally was closer to 12. If you want to know what to eat there, hit me up. I can point you to every restroom. The Tiki Room is the best place to nurse, but in a jam, the People Mover will do. Fast passes and parking and what you should pack are second nature to me. I never thought I would wax romantic about Disney World, but here we are. It is a wonderful place, Walt really did good work and the thought of Main Street in the fall nearly brings me to tears.
Consider everything you’ve heard about Florida. It is most likely true.
~
The first week after our move I was invited to a baby shower for someone I didn’t know. I’d spoken to a few girls on the phone - even had a friend from medical school who matched there the year before, so I wasn’t starting entirely from scratch, but I definitely had that familiar, middle school new-girl feeling. I stewed about whether to go or not. It’s one thing to get to know people at church, or the park, or a party. It’s another to attend a party for someone you’ve never met. I probably went through six different outfits. I showed up with a stomach of nerves. We played a charades game that was so far out of my comfort zone as the new girl I thought I might throw up.
Carly, who I went with ended up becoming one of my very best friends. Brooke, who the party was for ended up becoming one of my very best friends. Sometimes bravery is loud. Sometimes bravery is just showing up.
~
A few months after we got to Florida, everything fell apart. We were supposed to go to Switzerland in October, with dreams of the Alps in the fall, cozy fondue, sweater weather! But two things got in the way. The first was Hurricane Matthew, which was hurtling towards us at breakneck speed, predicted to be as big as Katrina. (Spoiler: it was not.) The second was a miscarriage. After nearly a year of trying to have another baby I was pregnant, but then I started spotting and visited my doctor days before we were supposed to leave. She was concerned the pregnancy was ectopic (Spoiler: it was not) and was concerned about me flying to another country. That same week our car also refused to start.
I remember sobbing that night with Kevin, not necessarily because of the trip, or the miscarriage, but because during all of this, I had people to call. Claire was two at the time, and even though we’d just moved, I had friends who welcomed her at a moment’s notice. Friends who brought me flowers. Friends who hugged me, even cried with me. I was so afraid that when we moved away from family I would be doing everything on my own. Instead, it was an induction to a new sort of family. One of the best parts of living away from family, ironically.
I can’t count how many hours I spent with my friends. At parks, pools, air-conditioned houses. I rocked babies while my friends folded laundry. I folded laundry while my friends rocked babies. We sat on the back porch watching naked toddlers stumble through sprinklers. Brought countless picnics and dinners to parks. We ate Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas morning breakfast together, visited each other in hospitals. Once in awhile we would hire a babysitter in the middle of a Saturday so we could watch a matinee in the cool theater. We celebrated birthdays, lamented pregnancies, cried from lost pregnancies, delivered meals, picked up groceries for each other. When people ask me what I miss the most about living in Florida the answer is easy: the people. The people who were more family than friends. The people who made the long afternoons and evenings alone worthwhile and even bearable. There was no wasted act of kindness. Those women, those people were my mother because I was so far from my own.
I don’t know where you are moving. Maybe it’s to Alaska, maybe the state next door, maybe just a few hours away from home. Wherever it is - I hope you find your people. Because they will become your home.
~
Second year of residency our Hazel Jane was born, blazing bright and beautiful like a meteor - she has not slowed down since. After a year of trying to get pregnant, a miscarriage, more waiting and then a grueling pregnancy, she was here and Claire became a sister and we became parents, again.
Two months after she was born we went to Utah for Christmas. Kevin used one of his three weeks off a year to be there - and we spent four out of seven of those days in the hospital. A day into our trip we went to Duck Creek, 3.5 hours away from Utah Valley, isolated in the snowy mountains when she suddenly struggled to eat, spiking a temp so high we left in the middle of the night, racing down the icy roads to the hospital where they admitted her after an ambulance ride and a spinal tap that they made me leave the room for.
For three nights I wept. My baby girl was confined to an elevated bed, tubes going in her nose, into her arms and legs. I held her only to nurse, so grateful that I could help her in some small way. I sang so many songs. Edelweiss and I Will Follow You Into the Dark and Sweet Baby James and all of Allison Krauss. The doctor told me that if she was even 90 days old this wouldn’t be as serious. Kevin joked that he traded one hospital for another but he never complained, never did a thing but rock our baby when he could, and translate the medical language for me and ask all of the right questions. It wasn’t the first time I relied on him as a doctor and not a father, but something about those days made me grateful that he is both.
Days later we decided to bless her, at home. Pre-COVID, the men around her wore masks - painting masks my dad had in the garage. They hovered over her and they gave her a blessing from God. I cried later, because it wasn’t the blessing I would have planned, instead rushed and timed right before Christmas. “She was a wanted baby,” my sister said, acknowledging my frustration. “You’re sad because you want to celebrate her life.” But that wasn’t it. It was that I was so close to losing her and never are you more aware of what you love than when you are about to lose that thing. I cried because maybe if I could give her the perfect party, the perfect life, maybe I could keep her with me a little longer.
I was reminded of this again a year later. Kevin was on 24 Saturday call (the worst kind) and I took the kids to the gym and the mall to kill time. We had Chick Fil-A at the food court and I took pictures of them sitting at the tiny table and chairs. As we pulled into the driveway I turned around to make sure Hazel was awake. She was unconscious, her eyes rolled back, head slumped to her shoulder. I parked and ran to her, watching her body convulse, her face turn blue. 911 arrived, and I held my baby on the sidewalk, thinking that I would always remember this, because it would be the last time I held her alive. I became someone I never thought I would be, yelling at the operator to have the ambulance hurry. I screamed into the phone. I had a true out of body experience, watching myself on that sidewalk, the indifferent clouds gathering above me, Claire shouting at me from her carseat to let her out, neighbors, perhaps more than one - watched my grief through their windows.
All three of us rode in the ambulance - Claire chatting with the workers, me sobbing, my baby girl coming out of what would be her first febrile seizure. Kevin met us at the ED where they pumped her full of fluids, treated a lung infection that spiked her fever, then sent us home. Carly, a real-life angel, took Claire for the night and Kev returned to his shift. We played blocks on the floor together. I let her pad around the house as slow as she wanted, reading every book, her body, her face a miracle. I slept on the floor next to her crib, and it took everything in me not to climb inside and curl up next to her.
I don’t want to relive that night, or the other seizures. I don’t want to think about them ever again. I don’t want to remember her body in that hospital bed, either. They called it a nest. A nest! As though she were a baby bird, waiting to be fed. Or a mouse in a tangle of string. I want to forget her blue face, that sheer terror. The moment when I saw myself, kneeling on the ground, anticipating the worst moment of my life. But sometimes, remembering them reminds me of my love for her. She is the most wild human I have encountered. She is still the brightest and most beautiful. I couldn’t love her more if I tried.
~
There are three places in our time in Florida that deserve a medal - gold, silver and bronze, and I won’t wax too poetic here, but they are Gainesville Health and Fitness, Trader Joe’s and the Alachua County Library on Tower Road. Gold goes to GHF of course, mostly because of the two hours of free child care a day I took full advantage of. Since I am no longer a patron, I feel like it’s safe to recognize that while most of the time I did work out, occasionally I brought my book to the lobby and ordered a protein shake and got lost in Nora Ephron. Call nights were perfect for the gym, too, because at the Tioga location I would drop the kids off, order Cilantro Taco and read my book. I soaked in the hot tub more times than I should admit, and am still in touch with 90 year old Jane, who went for her carpal tunnel pain and may be one of the only people that reads this blog. I actually teared up when I cancelled my membership.
At Trader Joe’s, the manager Ron, introduced me to other employees, calling me “one of his regulars,” and opening bags of new items for me to sample. You know in movies how people walk into a coffee shop or a pizza parlor and the person behind the counter asks if they want their “regular?” Well, it wasn’t quite that but it was the closest I’ve ever come to that. And the library - the library where I would go to work after hiring a sitter, where I checked out nearly every French pastry cookbook, where I borrowed hundreds of children’s books, many of which we were forced to buy at an outrageous price because of tearing or water damage! Pam, our librarian for four years began to put books aside for me and Claire. She never called me a regular. But she hugged me before we left. She told Claire to keep reading. Nothing has made me feel like a place is home more than a librarian knowing my name.
~
I wrote three books in residency, nearly one a year. All of them were written in spurts - during nap time and quiet time and evenings when Kev worked late. I sent out a lot of queries. I got a lot of rejections.
Medicine, though it is long and strenuous and expensive, is also very certain. There is a clear path to success. Pass your boards, show up for work, jump through the medical hoops. As long as you work at it and you don’t get addicted to drugs, it’s almost a guarantee. (This is an exaggeration, but for the sake of my story, it’s the narrative I’m telling myself.) Writing is a different animal, maybe because it’s easier, maybe because it’s much harder to get right, most likely because the same people who aspire to be doctors are not writing creatively and are wired differently. I sent a lot of hopeful texts to Kevin. (“They asked for my first 50!) and even more disappointed messages. (“They said they published a mermaid book last year and it was a flop so will not be moving forward with me.”)
Writing is not a straight line. There is no formula, or path to success. Talking about failure is uncomfortable, admitting it is painful. Sometimes it is difficult being married to a successful person. His dreams are within reach and mine feel like trying to catch a cloud - flimsy and frustrating and only occasionally fun, in the right weather. Maybe I’m an insecure person or delusional, but I’d like to think I’m just a dreamer, who still believes things will unfold for me. I am very proud of Kevin, of course I am. I have had a front-row seat to the fatigue and slog and precision of his profession. But it’s hard sometimes, to always be in the audience clapping when inside I feel like I was born to be a star.
~
You know how in movies, lives flash before eyes right before death, and there’s these beautiful, tender moments with a child or a loved one? I sometimes wonder if those moments for me will be the crunch of my toast or that awkward moment before the water gets hot enough in the shower, or me nodding when someone is telling a long-winded story. When I close my eyes and think about Florida, I see it all.
Waiting in line at Blaze for family date. Period films with Jamie and Brooke. Breaking up fights between Claire and Zoe and Emery. Sitting on the floor in the girls’ room watching them tramp around in too-big dress-ups and crooked bows. The rainbows that lit up the muggy sky after a fall storm. Glow-sticks in the church parking lot on Halloween, eager voices and tiny Woody’s and Elsa’s in the dark. Throwing up, night after night after Kevin fell asleep, wondering why they call it morning sickness. Bunco nights and girls nights and chatting with friends until late, stuffing my face with candy I don’t even like. The click of the door. The rumble of the dryer. Cards with the Goodman’s, our scores etched inside the box. Trees flung across the sidewalks after a big storm.
~
Back to residency. It gets a bad rap. I think, because it used to be largely unregulated and the older docs who went through it back then haven’t forgotten and some of them like to take it out on their residents. It’s like hazing, at a university, and some of them forget that in just a few years these doctors will be their equals. There was a surgeon in our neighborhood, for example, who always said hello and sometimes chatted with me when our kids played at the park together. But if Kevin was there he pretended not to see him and would no longer acknowledge me. Despite a few bad eggs though, it’s not as bad as you’ve heard - though there can be toxic programs, so if you’re prepping for the match be sure to ask residents about how they report their hours and whether they are told to fudge their numbers.
There are good months and bad months, and knowing that both are temporary really helps you keep it in perspective. At UF, each resident does a month of mole, broken into two week increments. Their shifts go from 5 PM to 7 AM and I usually tried to visit family because I hated being around for it. Kevin would come home in the morning, eat something and sleep until 4, then wake up and shower and head back in. I felt like we had to be quiet during the day so he could rest, and then all night I was a stress case, wondering if he’d get relieved and come home at midnight or 3 AM or not at all.
Some months he would working the pain clinic and be off by 3 or 4 and work M-F like a regular guy. Just like medical school, my friends understood when it was a good month and honored that. We’d do less park dates in the afternoon and understand when plans got broken because they got off early. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be as seen as I was there, with dozens of women whose husbands had the same strange life.
~
I felt sad a lot. Kev called it sundowners, because it got worse the longer the day went on. I kept telling myself I would take something for it but I was always pregnant or trying to get pregnant or I felt pretty good that day so I never did but I thought about it a lot. I started seeing a therapist at UF. She had really short brown hair and didn’t wear makeup. I felt so overdone as I sat in her office with my straightened hair and eyeliner. Every time I left a session I had a lump in my throat. “I’m not even sure why I’m here!” I would tell her, every session. I have the best life! My husband is the best! My kids are the cutest! We have everything we need! This is crazy that I’m sitting here, when I don’t need to be!
But I would leave a session and a couple days later feel it all over again - that cramping in my chest, like someone was reaching in me and wringing out my heart. One time, a couple sessions in she said, “It sounds like maybe you are lonely.”
How could I be lonely? I thought on my drive home. I’m never alone.
But I kept thinking about how I felt when she said that, how my first reaction was defensiveness, almost as though being alone were a disease. Social leprosy. An embarrassing pox. Only losers were lonely. People with no friends, no family. But my defensiveness nagged at me, and I brought it up again at our next session and it felt like such a realization to admit to myself that yes, all of that time in the green house with Kevin away, my small children whittling away my life with tiny demands, the friends who had their own lonely hours to fill, all of it added up to an ache that I couldn’t fix on my own. It turns out that years of living, mostly alone, is like a canyon whose sides erode by the wind after thousands of years.
A friend emailed me a couple months ago, saying he was considering going to chiropractic school as a second career and would I recommend professional training, as they had three children? Ask me on a good day and I might tell you that yes, it’s wonderful and it’s not as hard as they say it will be, because it’s like anything that is truly difficult - you look back and you minimize it because you survived it. But ask the girl on the therapist couch and you might get a different answer. So I told him the truth. That there is a cost to it, and you may not recover. I would never try to talk anyone out of their dream, because I am a huge fan of dreams, cheerleader, burn the barn down fan of dreams. But at the end of it all, I cannot in good conscience recommend this path 100%, regardless of the good outcome. Only you can weigh the cost with the benefit. Only you can grapple with the physical ache in the center of your chest.
~
I fell in love with my OBGYN. She looks like a grown-up Doc McStuffins, headband and all, and truly, the highlight of my month was my visits with her. She woke up to deliver Hazel, 2 AM in a hoodie and glasses, and I resisted the urge to ask her to pose for a picture with us. Our daughters took ballet together, and I marveled that we were in the same social universe. During my pregnancy with Bowie she repeatedly told me I was her healthiest patient and though no one saw, I felt like the teacher’s pet and was much prouder than I should have been about it.
My third pregnancy was my worst. Fourth year of residency, we planned to have him before we moved so Kev could cash in on his three weeks of sick leave he accumulated by never taking a day off. (This is pathetic to admit, but it is the truth.) I spent a lot of time on the couch. A lot of time on the floor, watching the girls make messes I knew I wouldn’t have the energy to clean up. I dragged myself to the gym every day for the childcare and put up with the weird comments from older men (why is it always older men?!) about my growing body and whether or not it was safe for me to lift weights. We planned to find out the gender on Christmas morning, and I asked the ultrasound tech to keep it a secret and write the gender down in an envelope. I planned to send it to my mom before Christmas so she could wrap up a gift to put under the tree. But the tech began talking to me about the adult daughter she recently lost, her grief tangled up in stories about her own pregnancy, the ache she felt for her daughter that she sometimes tried to text, forgetting she was gone. Before I left she said, “He’s perfect. Completely healthy.” Then she realized her mistake and her eyes went wide and I hugged her and told her I was hoping it would be a boy, and thank you so much. I stepped out from the office and it was better than any Christmas morning, ever.
Our Bowie came so easily into the world it was almost comical. I went into labor on my own eight days early, just as the COVID shutdown began. We got to the hospital and Kevin bought me a Starbucks blueberry muffin and they admitted me almost immediately, the red carpet rolled out for the darling of the department, (who would later win an award for best OBGYN resident. Proud wife moment.) For a few hours we watched shows and I took a nap. Around 1 PM the doctor came in and said she wanted me to deliver this baby during her shift and broke my water. Half an hour later I was ready to push. She knew Kevin, asked if he wanted to do the honors. I thought I would be mad that he wasn’t holding my hand while I pushed, but I loved that he caught our buddy, cut the cord, was the first to see his son. I told the doctor I pushed for 20 minutes with Claire, five with Hazel. “How long do you think I pushed with him?” I asked her. “Maybe five seconds,” she laughed. I ate an entire King-size bag of peanut butter M&M’s while they cleaned him up and felt a loss like I do every time I have the baby because we are no longer one person.
For centuries people have written poetry about falling in love, but having babies is what does it for me. Although in a way, I guess they are kind of the same thing. Love - no matter the form, is the universal muse.
~
The last two months of our time in Florida was tainted by the virus that is still weaseling its way into every facet of modern life. I left so many friends without even saying goodbye. There were no parties, no last park dates or girls nights. Most of my friends never even got to see my new baby. It is a strange time for a transition, a terrible time for anyone coming or going, or dying or being born. My Mom wasn’t able to come for the first time ever after I had a baby, and I ached for her, especially that first night in the hospital. No matter how many times you do this, you want your mom.
Kevin was home for nearly a month. He took Claire to play tennis every morning in the heat. He picked up groceries. We drove around just for something to do, the streets eerie, apocalyptic even, with people out in masks and lines forming outside our grocery stores. It was the worst kind of goodbye to a place I came to love.
Most of my work, (freelance writing and brand consulting) dried up as the virus spread because most of my clients were in the now floundering, travel industry. I kept getting these emails from banks, retail stores, even Etsy shops I was somehow on the email list for and everyone was saying the same thing. “We’re all in this together,” “Stay safe.”
I would like to come out of retirement, offering up my services to anyone with an email list. Here’s what I want to say and more importantly what I want to read:
“This sucks. We don’t know how to move forward. We’re all terrified but equally annoyed. Here’s a massive discount because we want you to irresponsibly spend your stimulus check on hair bows.”
Available for hire immediately.
~
It’s hard to talk about residency, the four beautiful, brutal years we spent in training in one essay. It’s impossible to sum up. But because there are many who are uncertain about their futures, who are approaching training in any profession with fear of the unknown, I feel the need to share what I know after coming out the other side.
What I have been trying to say here, is this: It gets better. You get better at being alone. You get more realistic about expectations. You learn to carve memories into spaces that you otherwise would have passed over. Residency isn’t the scary beast you were warned about. It is simply more training, but training you get paid for, and training your S.O. will enjoy more.
What I want to say is this: It will end, even when you think it never will. You will land your dream job. You will cry silently as your plane makes its descent into the Salt Lake Valley, your third baby nestled against your chest. Only you will fully understand what it meant to get there. Only you will understand the weight of it, the stretch marks that dot your stomach and your heart from the growth of leaving, and working, and returning. You did it together, but you also survived it alone. Your experiences will never be the same, which is something you will learn from years of solitude, and you will find peace in that understanding.
After years of our life being prescribed for us, four years here, four years there, four years here, it is finished. Or maybe - at the risk of sounding trite - it is only beginning. Because life, no matter where you are living it, is yours. You are the only person who gets to live inside your body, who gets to live your exact life. Because of that, only you understand each cut it took to carve you into the monument you are. Everyone else just sees the statue.
