Wednesday, August 18, 2010

In the Trenches

I don't do a very good job of reading over my past blogs. Good thing I post infrequently, because then all of my stories seem new! So, forgive me if I've told this one before.

I know that I've mentioned my amazing friends. I am blessed to have a whole host of wonderful friends, all over the country. Today's focus is on my residency friends. Each year in residency is marked by "R" and the year. Intern year is R1. Second year, R2, etc. You normally stop counting after you graduate, so for me at the R3 level. An alternate way to mark time is PGY (post graduate year). PGY is better if you're doing a fellowship, because you're not an "R" anymore, you're a Fellow (so an "F"??), so PGY is more accurate. Anyway, I bring this up because my class is crazy tight and are still counting by "R"s. We're R7s this year.

I don't know it always amazes me, but our class continues to be close. We're technically 4 years out of graduation now. Last weekend, one of our classmates got married in Hawaii. There are 12 of us (of a class of about 25) who hang out on a pretty regular basis. Of those 12, 10 of us were in Hawaii to celebrate (one of the 2 who didn't come just had a baby, the other is getting married himself in less than a month).

I was telling a non-medical friend about how going through residency creates a bond that is hard to describe. "It's kind of like going to war with these people by your side..." My friend's reply: "Is that because y'all killed a lot of people?" I admit I laughed at the morbid joke. But, I think the simile really is true. You are at your worst - and you see the worst - with these people. You laugh and cry together, you share a bunk bed together, you eat together, you support each other on a daily basis. And there are definitely those days when you look across the patient's bed at your fellow resident and think, "Truly, I couldn't have made it through the night without you."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

R7s 4EVA! (until next year.)