I'll see you in the ICU!

just when you thought it was safe...

I'm starting to look at anesthesia programs in the area.

So far, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not going to get in anywhere. Applications are due either in November or January and either way, I'll have (still) zero experience so who would accept me?

Kaiser Fullerton's program requires a minimum of two years in the ICU and so does SUNY (not that I wanted to go back to New York, but at least Brooklyn is tollerable)

Ay caramba. It's looking like next year will either find me going back to NYC or giving up on the whole thing altogether. I'm not the sort that likes those odds (of hanging around and waiting to get into a different program) because there's no guarantee I'll get in anywhere, for years. So, by the time I'd be even slightly competative, I could have just been done with the whole program at Columbia.

This whole thought depresses me.

Then, I wake up and find an email from the director of the anesthesia program at Columbia, mistakenly, somehow CCed me along with the group of people she was emailing about some accreditation bullshit...could it get any more pathetic over there?

So, now, a sort of count down begins in which I worry about having to leave again, my elderly dog's advanced age and me not being here if something happens to him, about the miserable weather there, and not having a car, and how rotten and fatiguing it is for me to ride the subay...

Either I give up, or I resign myself to this.

I'd love to apply somewhere else, but I'd have to re-write my essay, ask for more letters of reference, and holy hell...is it worth all that? It's excruciating to go through the application prossess (not to mention, it costs an average of a hundred bucks per application)

This sucks.

I just don't see myself in the ICU for years and years. It's interesting, but I really don't love bedside care and find a lot of stuff that bugs me about patient care. I hate watching people wither away on ventilators, or going in to find that my patient of last week has coded and died on my day off...

I can't see myself doing this for more than a year or two max.

posted by sketchmonkey @ 8:55 PM