And so it continues

So I finished my first Emergency Medicine rotation and I am one week into me second one. This department is more of a community hospital so there is not a lot of trauma coming in. In addition, there are a lot of nursing homes in the area so a lot of what I am seeing is Geriatric and because of the Crisis and Detox unit I am seeing psychiatric emergencies as well. Certainly much different pathology than before.

I also started my Residency application by submitting my application to various Osteopathic programs. I am waiting to submit to the allopathic programs too. In the meantime I am studying for boards which I take towards the end of September. I am almost done with the first run through of the material and am hoping to start the second run through this week. I need to get through a lot of questions, my goal is more than 2000 questions by the time boards comes along.

Have 4 kids is certainly more a juggling act than it was before but we are getting into our groove. The only issue is that money is even tighter than before and I am waiting for the financial aid office to increase my cost of living so that I can take out more in loans. However, we are getting some assistance from the state since the loans are not considered to be income and my wife is not making a king's ransom. The way I think about it is that I paid into the system for all of the years that I was working and now I am collecting what I am due. But in about a year from now all of that assistance will disappear because I will be working as a resident and we will no longer qualify for state assistance.

I cannot wait for the glorious day of graduation and then residency to start. Then we can start moving forward with our other plans. Including upgrading our house. Wow, for more than 10 years I have been studying for this moment and it is almost here. I have been in school for almost 30 years and I cannot wait to stop. Though I will never stop learning, I will never have to be a student again.