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On my way home, on a layover at DIA.
The rest of my month was equally as awesome. One of the weeks was kind of a cluster due to an attending being stuck abroad when he was supposed to be in the unit. But I weathered that well and my interest in critical care is confirmed. The attendings that followed that first week were REALLY good, though perhaps not quite as amazing as the one I had the first week, so I'm confident that it wasn't just her effect. I got really good comments from the residents I worked with, and ended up with a really good med student partner for the last three weeks who I worked with extremely well. I can certainly imagine her being a gunner in the right circumstances, but we had a good system that pushed us both to work hard, and I know we both benefited from it.
I will be getting a letter of rec from the attending I had the last week (she was on thursday to Friday, including a full weekend on call...so I got to see her alot.
ERAS, the residency equivalent of AMCAS opens tomorrow to actually submit applications - but not all programs begin accepting applications right away - some wait until the 15th and others until the first of October. I've spent a moderate amount of time getting information into the system, but have yet to upload my personal statements, as it's still in that final tweaking stage. I have a couple versions I'm toying with, and the process just takes some time.
I have a meeting with our Peds Chairman next week, and he will be writing one of my letters as well. Most of the Chairmen at my school do this, operating with the mindset that they should do all they can to help students reach their goals, but it seems that's not always the case elsewhere. The med student I worked with in the PICU wants to do OB/GYN and said her chairman doesn't do letters unless she's actually worked with the student. It was interesting see the differences between the two hospitals.
I'd say I'm about 90/10 at this point critical care vs cardiology/pulm, but that might be generous in terms of cards or pulm. We got a lot of consults from those specialties in the PICU, and I have to say that I just wasn't as enthused about them as I thought I might have been. They're still interesting, but my reflex excitement to them wasn't as strong or intense as critical care was.
It may be a bit of of editorializing on my part, self selecting the aspects I like most about Critical Care as evidence of my desire to do it in the future, but I'm really excited about it. Most of the residents (Anesthesia, ED, and Ortho) I was hanging with socially smirked when I said I wanted to do PICU (most smirked when I said I was doing peds to begin with) and then brought up any number of reasons why it was a poor choice, and on most occasions, when I thought of their criticism, it was actually something that I either liked, could see myself doing, or even if not enjoyable (like talking with families about withdrawing care) were things that I'd much prefer to have be my responsibility. (In regards to the withdrawing care discussions...I've been in several, and to be honest, I wished the attending or resident would have let me do it, because I honestly believe I would have done a better job...)
Anyways, that's where we stand. I start Diagnostic Radiology on Tuesday...going in at 8:30 is going to be akin to sleeping in for me at this point.
As an administrative note, when I do start talking about specific programs, I'll only refer to them as Program A, B, C etc. They may get a few other identifiers but I won't be naming programs by name. I think that saves my anonymity and will allow me to be a little bit less restrained in my comments. Obviously I've tried to keep my current location masked to a certain extent (though I think you could probably figure it out), and if you are extremely interested in a certain location, PM me and I'll decide on a case by case basis who gets to be privileged to that information.
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