ER and things

In the ED rotation now.
Long weekend (two 12-hr shifts).
Sutured 2 lacerations today. Need to be better, be more organized, more confident.
Went 0 for 2 on the venous sticks today. Quite the disappointment. There's still more veins out there.
Then lost 4 times on the Volleyball field today, despite a valiant and a very much improved effort by my team.

But I feel good.

In other news, Match is coming up. Yea. Cue ulcer.
For those of you who don't know what Match is, let me s'plain...
It is that fateful moment when all the medical programs we medical students applied to get to tell us that we are hired!
So as a med student, I apply to X number of programs. They, in turn, receive many med school applicants (myself and the thousands of others applying for a job) for interview. In the end, there can be only one!!! Wait, got movie side-tracked...
In the end, each medical program participating in the match ranks their medical applicants from 1 to whatever. And each one of us applicants get to rank the programs we applied to from 1 to whatever, as well. So, a match happens when a program and an applicant rank each other evenly. This is done by a big computer in the sky. Whatever. The rub is this, I'm competing against many (hundreds) medical students for a limited number of positions (it can be as low as 1 or as high as 60, mine is between 6-24) in my top ranked programs and each of my top ranked programs gets to generate their own rank list of applicants.
Now, I interviewed in 12 pediatric residency programs. I'm ranking all of them. It is my hope that my top ranked programs put me within their high rankings, so come match day, I get into a residency program that I like and of course, a job come June/July.
So there are multiple types of matches (military, San Francisco, ACGME, AOA, etc). I am going for the allopathic match despite me being a DO student. It affords me greater geographic range and more options for residency (not all residencies are the same). Disadvantages, both DO and MD students can apply in the allopathic match, so the competition gets larger and stiffer.
This is the ulcer part: Worst case scenario, I don't match and I have to scramble, meaning I get on the phone and call every program that has an available opening to see if they'll take me. It's not very pleasant, nor pretty, and it certainly puts you in a program that is not necessarily your specialty let alone choosing.
Allo match goes down some time in March (DO or AOA match happens in Feb). Until then, I cross my fingers, write my thank you letters, and pray to God I didn't screw up my interviews/rank list.

And that's the update.

Song of the day: "Kids" - MGMT