Days 356-362: The End and The Beginning

June 29, 2018 was the official last day for my hospice and palliative medicine fellowship as well as my status as the trainee.  In August, I will start as the trainer.  What a daunting task.  Sometimes, I'm not sure I'm ready to be in that role.  I feel like I still have so much to learn myself.  I realized that there is always going to be this sense of need to learn as much as I can.  I am excited for my new role and to know that I am not going to have to do too many weeks of back-to-back consults.  I will have medical students, residents, and fellows working with me.  I will be working to make the home calls a more cohesive group.  I will be working on my narrative medicine expertise as well as my role as a mentor.  I will be teaching bioethics for the brand new medical students.  I am nervous and excited.  Before I get too far ahead of myself, though, I have six weeks of rest and relaxation.  Or at least not going into work and packing to move to a new house.

Days 331-355: An end and a new beginning

Today marked my graduation from my hospice and palliative medicine fellowship and the end of my time as the trainee.  In one week, I will be officially done with fellowship.  I get six weeks off before starting as faculty, the moment I have been waiting for since I was a medical student.  In the meantime, I will be packing since LOML and I will likely be moving into a new house before I start my new position.  It's been quite the crazy series of events to get the house we are currently under contract on.  We looked at a group of houses in the neighborhood where we thought we wanted to buy, only to find that the layouts of the houses were not what we liked.  When then started again with a new search, and had two houses we liked at the end of the day: newer construction with vinyl siding and an all-brick house with great updates but on a septic tank.  We went with the newer construction, had everything ready for the offer, and were told it went under verbal contract.  So we looked at another house in the same neighborhood that was the plan we liked.  We put in an offer, only to have the sellers back-out and decide they didn't want to sell.  Finally, I convinced LOML that we really did want the all-brick house because it had everything on our list other than a screen-in porch.  We put in the offer, and it was accepted immediately.  We are now getting the inspections and appraisals scheduled, and will hopefully close the beginning of August.  We've shoved as many big events into one year that we can.  We are excited.  I can't wait to start my new job as daunting as it feels.