Match Day!

Yesterday was crazy! I'm so glad I took the day off. First, I thought the results were released at 9am, the same time we learned if we Matched on Monday. So we had a few frustrating moments until I realized we were an hour early. Their was also a bunch of family e-mails flying around asking for news. And the kids were feeding off the stress by making a commotion with their two friends who were over for a play day (one kinda invited himself somehow).

So around 9:45a I get a text message from a classmate that she got her first choice. I'm excited for her, but jealously wondering why I haven't received anything. A few minutes later the text messages really start to fly and I'm hitting refresh constantly, alternating between my e-mail account and the NRMP website. Finally, around 9:55a I refresh the NRMP site and instead of saying "Congratulations, you've Matched" as it had for the last three days, it adds three new text lines under this:

Program Code: blah blah blah
Emergency Medicine
U COnnecticut Hlth Ctr

I Matched UConn!! I will admit there was a moment of disappointment as I had been getting used to the idea of having the name Hopkins on my CV. But I remembered how much I liked the area and the people. I matched one of my top three EM programs! There was a frenzy of text messages flying among classmates. I even started texting friends I had met along the externship and interview trails. I especially enjoyed talking with Jeremy with whom I both rotated at UMass and interviewed at UMass. We had similar feelings about it and UConn where he was going to medical school. So it was fun to talk, for the first time, with a fellow incoming intern.

I also had to look up some of my notes on UConn to refresh my memory on the program. I didn't do a second look there, so some of the details were muddled up with the other ten programs I interviewed at. Finally, there were lots of family e-mails, cell phone calls and Skype calls. Becky was overjyoed with relief. The boys were a bit ambivalent because they just didn't grasp the significance of the whole thing.

About 10:15a as fate would have it, a real estate agent called about showing the house. So in the midst of the Match frenzy and the four wild boys we had to clean-up the house for a showing - that ended up as a No Show anyway.

I then went to lunch with three of my closest friends in the class. We had a nice lunch congratulating eachother, texting friends/family and even fielding calls from the programs welcoming into our new programs. It was a little weird in that the three had more certainty about there choices going in and ended up getting their first choices. I felt I had a good chance at Hopkins, but wasn't certain at all. So my feelings were a little more mixed.

I went home after doing a few errands and got ready to have Tucker and his family over for dinner. We went very casual but made sure to have a good stock of wine on hand. I got pleasantly tipsy as we talked the night away about Southbend, ID for him, and Hartford, CT for me.

It's kinda scary in that I still feel a little sketchy about the program I'm going to be starting at as a new intern in three months. There's not much on the web and I don't know any of the Residents well enough to call them for a long chat. But I know I felt very comfortable there and confident of receiving a great education.

The previous week I probably averaged 4-5 hours of sleep a night. In fact, I caught a cold from the lack of sleep. However, last night, after some wine and the relief of knowing where I Matched, I slept almost 10 luxurious hours.