3.5 years as an Attending and New Issues come up

Ladies and Gentleman,

Sorry for my absence. I have been very busy for the last few years. Some updates since my last post.

As you can see from the title of my post, I have completed my training fully. I have not only finished medical school, but I also completed a residency in Internal Medicine and a fellowship in Critical Care Medicine. I have also had the pleasure of passing all of my boards. This means, that for the first time since I can remember, I do not have an exam to study for (at least not for the the next 4 years). My next exam is my recertification in Internal Medicine in 2024. Meaning, I would have been practicing as an Internist for 10 years.

It has been, and continues to be, a long arduous journey. And if you are reading this blog for the first time, let me tell you that the journey was a long one. I started my path to fulfilling my dream in 2003. At that time, I was working full time and had a very young family (only 1 child) and was in the early years of graduate school. My wife and I were waiting for the baby to fall asleep while we were on the porch of the hotel room. I had a 4.0 GPA in graduate school (a far cry from the 2.5 in undergraduate) and had the idea of applying to medical school. I did not want to live with regret and wanted to at least try.

As I said, I have completed my training. I passed my critical care boards in 2018. From start to finish, it took 15 years to complete. You read it right, 15 years. And during that time, I learne a lot about myself and my family. During those 15 years, I was blessed with 4 daughters, 3 presidents, the Great Recession, selling a house, buying 2 new houses, getting in an accident with a deer, celebrating 20 years of marriage, have my marriage not the rocks, having my marriage survive those rocks, present at national meetings, having posters at meetings as a resident, and now attending. And finally, being recommended and accepting the positions of Program Director of the Transitional Year Residency and Director of Osteopathic Education.

As medicine goes, I will continue to keep learning and will be continuing to challenge myself. But now, there will be a new challenge. And this challenge has already started and has been seeing good results. The challenge is to be debt free. There is one thing that I did not expect to suffer from once I became an attending, and this is what I am going to be focusing on here. And that is “Doctoritis”. Will explain in future posts.