The wheels on the bus...

Time: it goes round and round, and soon, everything old is new again.

Last year at this time, I was preparing for a dramatic exit out of residency and into the real world, except didn't really get to make said exit, because I ended up staying in this pseudo connected position: gone but not really gone, taking the same T, but entering a different door across the street, same passwords, but no rights to look up info - you understand.

Now, I'm about to really walk out for ever, for real this time, but now it's totally anti-climactic and doesn't feel at all triumphant, like it should. Instead, I feel like I'm about to just slink away unnoticed.

I ended up at a party this weekend, with this year's third year residents who are now in the same position as I was last year. I was watching them, and I got to thinkin'...

Our system is so flawed, and sadly makes us all so lonely. We start out as students, cooped up for 2 years with the same 200 people in an auditorium/lab. You get to know everyone's idiosyncracies: who sneezes during a test, who drinks hot chocolate on a hot day, who only wears sweats during the day etc. Then, we get tossed around like a deck of cards from rotation to rotation, sometimes way far from home base (like Erie, PA, in the middle of a snow bank), where when working with one team, you're best friends with members of that team, but once your four weeks are up, you're gone and that's it. You say hi in the halls for a week, and then forget to even do that.

Then you graduate - and I remember, at my graduation, the Dean was making a congratulatory speech, and said, "You are now doctors, congratulations, and goodbye." And that was it. Four years of blood, sweat and tears, and 200 people who did it with you, and "goodbye," just like that. Walked out of the auditorium, and was no longer connected with the school at all.

As residents, you form really tight relationships in a very intense environment and very close quarters. You share aches and pains, the older ones train the younger ones, until everyone is on the same footing, and right then, invariably, every year, a new flock of freshly hatched docs is ready to fly the nest, pardon the metaphor, and the people who were your pillars of support for at least a year, end up scattering all over. And even with those that stay around, once the tie that bound you to each other - the residency, the common misery - is gone, you find things are just not the same.

A new class comes, and at first, they seem boring, and stiff, and there are weirdos all over, but eventually, you get to know them, and even the weirdos become YOUR weirdos, accepted like family. Until next year, when yet another class leaves, and yet another comes again.

For a person such as myself, who does extremely poorly with change, and tends to experience significant separation anxiety, this is probably the worst setting.

I was standing by the wall at this party, observing people I used to know closely and personally, finding that I feeling completely detached. There are only so many times you can say, "So, you ready to start?" (work, fellowship, etc)

Strangely enough, I wasn't bothered, just noting the fact. Thinking, how strange it is, that there are perfectly nice, intelligent, wonderful people that I genuinely like, who are going to leave this room tonight, and I will never see them again.

Flawed system, I tell ya.