Stay Put

My whole life is ambivalence these days.

I have a wonderful woman that I love, who won't quit smoking. I have a brand new Used Car that I love, but it's a Honda Accord, the most generic-sounding vehicle every invented. And now I have a new job lined up for July in an Emergency Room in New York City, but it's on the edge of an outer borough, neither a Trauma Center nor Residency-affiliated.

I'm not particularly peeved about it, but I suppose that's what "ambivalence" means. I'm in a holding pattern for the rest of the year. I took a job by default, a good-paying community job with a swell cast of characters and a couple really good friends on staff, the end result of an ill-defined job search whose parameters were less "A position in Academic Emergency Medicine where my strong interpersonal skills and aggressive knowledge acquisition can be well-utilized" and more "Anyone hire me please." I think I will fit in fine to start my life after residency, but whenever I get to the end of something and start looking back I always look at my skinny little CV/resume/Med School application and wonder, should I have been spending more time plumping that baby up, and less time searching the internet for reviews of cell phones?

I spent my residency not particularly distinguishing myself, much like I spent Med School and Undergrad in all honesty. I have no thirst for research (and I can never think of questions that fit between the bookends of "cannot possible be answered" and "has not already been asked a billion times"), or an overabundance of free time or energy to spend on endeavors like researching and advocating radical changes in health policy. I lack the Medical Heredity that is endowed by institutions like COLUMBIA and CORNELL and their ilk. I don't particularly like spending time with my superiors and prefer to interact only on the basis of performance reviews, which inevitably become a vague rendition of "Good job, buddy!" because of this manufactured distance.

And in the end, I took a good, well-paying job that is at least nominally academic with a staff of people that I very much like working with. So you have to ask yourself, what is the point of all this self-flagellation over unmet expectations? Well, at least no one ever says, "You lack an understanding of your faults."At this point they are very well understood and in fact enumerated in multiple small corners of the internet, if only we all knew where to look.

I still have a few CV's out there plummeting to the depths of the flooded inboxes of Department Chairs on Holiday. I have fantasies where I get several calls in a day offering me moving bonuses and future chairmanships to move to the Hill Country and work in an established Large Urban Trauma Center and then I buy a ranch and some horses and stare up at the uncluttered sky while the music of the moment overwhelms me. But ultimately that is a lonely dream, because there is no one else in it. And anyway I think that if I left too soon, the God who called me here would keep sending great big fish to swallow me up, and drag me back to the shores of Nineveh. Or, at the very least, maybe a few minnows to nibble my toes out of their complacency.