Monday was the answer to the yes or no question: did I match? Did I get a job? Did I spend the last four years acquiring a non-transferable skill set only to have to figure out what to do with my life next year? Today is the answer to all those other questions they taught you back in third grade: where? how? what?
Today I open a tiny little envelope that will tell me where I will spend the next five to seven years of my life. It will be the place I will learn how to be a surgeon. It will be the place that I'll be living when we tie the knot, maybe it will even be the place I'll be living when we start our family. That place has a lot of work to do in the next few years.
My rank list was spread across the country from the east coast to the west coast to the midwest to the pacific northwest to the south to staying right here in the same town I went to medical school. Opening that envelope today could send me anywhere in the country.
Today I open a tiny envelope that finishes the a journey I've been on for the last four years. Four years. Four years and no time at all. Someone once told me about residency that "the years are short but the days are long". That has been incredibly true of my med school experience thus far.
I am so thankful to have journals and blog entries and scraps of paper that have chronicled the journey between that first day and this one. Because it's hard to remember what it was like to be that first year medical student.
I pulled out one of those journals today and found something I'd written on August 22 2012
Plastic High Heels
Like almost every girl, I once owned a pair of those plastic dress up shoes with the bows and feathers spilling onto your toes. They never fit quite right as they like many childhood clothes went from too big to too small overnight. I remember the strange shuffle-clop step I used to make when walking in them, pretending my legs, so recently grown accomplished at flat-footed walking could manage the elegant clipped steps grown women take in their high heels.
I've managed that high-heeled walk now: the way your hips swing slightly wider and your feet follow a straight line. Now the heels are lined up in my closet black, red, and beige leather instead of green and pink plastic.
I haven't played dress up in years, but today that feeling of pretend came back when I slipped my arms into the sleeves of my white coat. I'm not really a doctor, just pretending to be one. I'm not really a doctor, just here waiting for my plastic high-heels to turn into ones of leather and my shuffling gait to make the sharp clip of a practiced step.
In four years time, I've done a lot. I've gone from clumsy first year to... well... to slightly less clumsy fourth year. Instead of getting every question wrong, I occasionally know the answers. I at least have some idea what to tell friends and family when they ask me for medical advice (although I still end every one of those conversations with "but you should talk to a real doctor" -- pretty soon I'm going to have to stop saying that last part).
Nothing about this feels real yet. Sitting here in my house drinking coffee in a nice dress and it's hard to think that in a few short hours I'll know.
Whatever the outcome of today, I will be a surgeon.
A surgeon.
Me.
Me the girl who used to bounce up and down on those plastic high heels on the tile in my parent's hall and laugh at the sound they made.
I can't say I wasn't warned the years would go fast.
There are a great many adventures ahead. Today won't make me feel any less like I'm playing dress up when I pull on that white coat. But it is one big step closer to the day it all feels real.
Today -- we finish the sentence.
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
~ Ulysses Alfred Lord Tennyson 
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