ERAS and Shark Boy

Labor Day weekend was supposed to be my weekend to play and maybe explore the area. But September 1^st was also the first day the ERAS applications opened up. Naturally I agonized about selecting programs and even specialties. So it was a good thing that that it rained until Monday the 3^rd, Labor Day.

I spent a good part of the weekend at the rental house, holed up in the one corner where I can get wireless Internet access from a neighbor’s router. I messed around with my ERAS application until I was sick of reading my own resume. Then I worked on program selection with web sites, my anal retentive spreadsheet and the ERAS selection process. Becky and the kids went to visit my father in San Diego so he got pretty involved in rating residency locations on how they would benefit Becky’s career and how easily he could get ITT deanships at each one.

In the end I picked 29 programs that broke up as follows. 19 are on the East Coast, 8 are in the Midwest and two (Phoenix and Portland, OR) are in the West. I flagged all the locations on Google maps and was surprised how East Coast centric it ended up. After playing in the San Diego surf for an afternoon the boys voted for a coastal location with beaches nearby. Some of the East Coast locations have good beaches, but the 19 cover Jacksonville, FL all the way up to Portland, ME so there’s a lot of areas that might be a bit cold for playing in the surf.

I still have one more to add. And I am thinking of either Davis, CA or Georgetown in DC at the moment. However, I also wrote up another Personal Statement for Family Practice in one of my paranoid moments. I still might throw in my top three rural FP programs as fallbacks. However, after sleeping on it a night, I realized this would distract me from EM and interviews for the programs would just cost more money and time and further exhaust me, if I even got interviews. For now I’m going to focus on EM programs solely and see if I can get any interviews. If get only get half a dozen I’m going to start getting worried. I would really like 10-12 and have really good feelings about 6-10 afterwards.

I was going to work on Monday evening, but the stress tired me out, even with 9 hours of sleep every night. So I enjoyed Monday’s sunshine by heading to the beach after I hit SEND on ERAS and paid my $375. The nearest beach, Folly, is pretty nice and seen from the pictures I got on my cell phone. The water is warmer than the West Coast, and even though it was windy and choppy I had a very nice walk. One of these days I want to go for a long ocean swim. I have to build up my confidence that one of tonight’s cases wasn’t an omen first though.

We had a 15 year old surfer come in with shark bites! Luckily they weren’t too bad as you can see from the picture. The other leg had similar small bites marks with a couple of deep heal lacerations and a little toe with a large triangular flap of tissue attached on one side. I would have liked to suture the wounds, but I was allowed (told) to leave early since I had conference in the morning. Some of the lacerations were good sized, but none were too deep. The weird part was how you see the crescent bite pattern from the mouth. Reminded me how the beach isn’t perfectly safe, especially at dusk.

Colton seems to be having a tougher time with my absence than his brother on this trip. He was always the child who got upset when having to say goodbye to relatives, so I guess it isn't too much of a surprise. But he's a happy outgoing soul you'd think introspective Connor might have a tougher time, especially stating Junior High. It was fun to share the shark case with Colton and cheer him up a bit. He always asks me if I have had any interesting cases. And just as he likes to share stories in intimate detail, he wants to hear every detail fully described regarding my medical cases. It will be interesting to see what careers the boys decide on given their greater exposure to the professions than I had. I like to think that Becky and I are also more savvy and street smart as parents than either of us had growing up.