Check Please!

Tonight is our first resident applicant dinner of the interview season. I always look forward to the dinners because it is the only opportunity we (significant others) get to get a glance at who could potentially be our newest member of our extended family. The OB/GYN program that Bret is a part of is medium size. We take four residents every year, it is a four year program, so we have a grand total of 16 people in our program. These people spend more time together than with their families. It's true. They work an average of 60-80 hours per week and sometimes are together for 36 hours straight. Even Bret and I don't spend 36 hours together without having a few tense moments. They work together in happy, sometimes very stressful, exhausting, terrifying, and sometimes heart wrenching times. They stick by each other, hopefully help each other out, and at the end of the day at the very least work together towards the same goal...patient care and survival.

Our current residents are from all different walks of life. Some are traditional students that went straight through college, med school, and into residency and some have a not so straight path that lead them to here. Some are married, some are single, some have kids, gay, straight, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, some from the US, some not...their differences make them better.

Of course I have my ideal candidate...a mid to late twenties guy married with a young family and who is not from here...maybe even from the Midwest. He has a fabulous wife that likes to scrapbook with a glass of wine, they are moving into the Deltas (our funny apartment complex of residents) and anxiously looking for new BFF that would happen to be us who would take them under our wing and become life long friends. No seriously I would love this. Sometimes being the spouse of a resident is very hard and lonely when you don't have family close by to fill that void that comes from the long hours and weekend call. The only other people that feel this is other spouses. In our program we have mostly women and so the spouses that I have united with are stay at home dads (who are great...I can spot them now at the gym..who knew?) but it is not the same. The only other wife is leaving me this year and even that wasn't the same b/c her parents lived almost next door.

Match (the process in which med students find out where they are going to do their residency and programs find out who is coming to their program) is a funny awful thing that is a whole other post by itself. For now I will say that you never know what is going to happen. So hopefully tonight we will connect to some of the people going and who knows maybe next year they will be coming over for dinners and becoming part of the family we have grown to love. Besides we get a free dinner out of it and who can complain about that?