Looking Back: March: Match Day

St. Patrick's Day may mean drinking until you're wasted for many people around the world, but to us it meant something quite different: MATCH DAY!  Match Day is the day when med students all throughout the US open an envelope and discover what city and school they have been assigned to, or "matched" to, for their residency.  This is the way it works: after interviewing at many different programs, each student turns in his or her rank link, which is just a list with all of the schools at which they interviewed ranked from 1 to 12 (in our case, but the number of interviews you go to varies for each person).  Then each school/program turns in their list of the candidates that they interviewed, ranking them from 1 downward in the order in which they want them in the program.  Then the lists are all put into a computer and the computer spits out your assignment.  End of story.  It's a bizarre process.

Many people go into Match Day waiting and wondering, clueless at to where they will end up.  It must be very nerve wracking and also very exciting for them!  For us it was a little anticlimactic, not because we weren't happy with Logan's "match" here in Colorado, but because we already had a pretty solid knowledge that Logan was matching in Colorado because he ranked it #1 and because of his scores and grades, along with the fact that his interview had gone so well and he had gotten so much positive feedback from this program, so there weren't any surprises for us on Match Day.  However, there is always that little chance that the computer could have sent us elsewhere, which we would have been totally fine with, especially with his top 3 to 5 choices, but it didn't.  

I spent a silly amount of time worrying about finding a cute green outfit, and while I do love what Jessica and I found, I ended up being ticked off at Logan through most of the ceremony, because after spending over an hour straightening and barrel curling my hair he made me RUN from our apartment to the school because we might have been a few minutes late.  It was windy, and by the time we got there I was very sweaty in my new outfit and my hair was trashed, not to mention that I could hardly breathe.  I am NOT a runner.  Men.  But I got over it, obviously.  Everyone was crammed into a room, which wasn't the best for Callum and I, so we just soaked in the revelry and excitement (everyone else was celebrating with some sort of green alcohol) and then spent most of the day in the hall hanging out with my dear friend Marie Newman and her kiddos, Isaac and James.  Isaac and Callum are big buddies, so they were as happy as clams.  The Newmans were a hugely important part of our St. Louis experience because Blake and Logan found one another early on in class and became fast friends.  They were with us through all four years of our journey, and we had countless dinners, game nights, park outings, and craft nights (Marie and I) together.  They stayed in St. Louis for Blake's residency in Neurology, and we miss them sorely!

After the ceremony I decided it was very anticlimactic to just go home and eat cereal for lunch, so I called up my Auntie Muriel, who lived two blocks away from us, and---miracle of miracles!---she was home and didn't have plans, so she graciously watched Callum for the afternoon so that Logan and I could walk down to eat at one of our favorite restaurants in the Central West End (our funky neighborhood) that we didn't often go to because it's a bit of a splurge.  We sat outside in the beautiful weather and had a lovely celebration together.  What a day!