The Next Chapter . . . Same As It Ever Was?

It has been a long while since I last posted. This is in part due to the last medical rotation I was wrapping up - pediatric Emergency Medicine at Children's hospital during the swine flu paranoia! That was a joy, let me tell you. Other than that I have been preparing to enter the next chapter of not only my medical training but my adult life in many ways. I have been in Seattle since 1992, when I first moved here to enter the Astronautical Engineering program at the University of Washington. I was a wide eyed kid with dreams of being an astronaut and the belief that I had found my true calling. I was making some headway to - in my studies and in my personal contacts. I was lucky enough to meet George "Pinky" Nelson here when he was faculty at the UW Astronomy Department. Pinky was an astronaut and one of the few that actually was trained in and tested the manned maneuvering unit (MMU). He set me up with some meetings down at Johnson Space Center to chat with folks about getting into the candidate selection process. I hung out with several astronuats at "The Outpost", a great little local tavern just outside the space center with more space memorabilia than most air & space museums. Sort of a dive, in a good way, it had a homey feel and I liked it. I felt all was going perfectly until a medical disqualification revealed that I would never be able to make the cut, no matter who I knew or how good my scores were. This sent me into a tailspin and took me many years to recover.

I continued forward in my studies not knowing what else to do, but in physics which seemed a little more universally applicable to whatever I discovered as my next path. My life felt more like a bad novel with no direction and no real center of focus but a strong need to find something. Looking here and there for a new plot line, a new leading character to model myself after. It was in this state I ended up working at an observatory in southern New Mexico where I became a rural EMT-Intermediate simply for fun and personal knowledge. Here I discovered my love of medicine, the professional love since astronautics. That started the next chapter of my life sometime around 2002, ten years after my original move to Seattle. It has been a long road through my pre-med (never took organic chem or biochemistry during physics), my applications to med school and my first rejection (in 2004) and eventual acceptance to UW (in 2005). Now I find myself about 6 years older and one M.D. richer and about to embark on the next chapter. Professional life as a physician.

Actually becoming an MD has been more anticlimactic than I expected and a little bittersweet. It starts with me moving to Sacramento, California. I am happy to have been accepted to such a good training program, but very sad to leave the only real home and close friends I have ever made in my life. When I was young I moved about every 8-12 months, never attended the same school twice and never made any friends that lasted for longer than a summer. I spent multiple summers in Maine on an island that was the closest thing I had to a home and it still remains close to my heart, but Seattle has become home for me in a way no other place has been able to and I did not even realize it until now. Now I am filled with sadness and a little disappointment that all my hard work has led to me losing much of the life that matters to me and is important to me. I know I will make a new life in Sacramento and my recent trip there reassured me that it will be a nice and welcoming city to make a new start in, but at 38 years of age making new starts is just not as appealing as it once was. Don't get me wrong, I am excited about my new house I just rented and the great weather and the new folks I will meet and work with in my EM program, but it is hard leaving my close friends here during such a stressful time in my life.

Thus begins the next chapter, the third chapter. I have withdrawn from the rest of the world for a number of years training and educating myself. I have discovered many new things about myself during the stress of this period, not just professionally. I now return to the world with this new degree, self-knowledge, respect and the social responsibility to heal and the maturity to look critically on my decisions and their repercussions. I am recognized, I am compensated financially (meagerly) and I will now try to develop not only my career but my atrophied personal life outside the walls of academia & education (somewhat) in a new city, with new friends and a new outlook. I am not fearful, I am not hesitant but I am also not eager or ncessarily excited. I am looking forward to aspects, don't get me wrong, but I am cautious. Mostly I am simply present, aware of so much more than I was at 21 when I thought leaving Montana to become an astronaut was going to be an adevnture like you read in a book. Now I know it is not a momentous event as much as it is just a string of small decisions that lead form one day to the next and suddenly you find yourself standing somewhere other than you started. When you live it from the inside it is just one minute to the next, each quite similar, like water eroding a riverbank that one day become the Grand Canyon. People look at it with awe at times, but the river just thinks it has been doing what it always does, moving forward, surging and receding. Whats the big deal? Now I have an MD at the end of my name. What next?