Hope

I got an interview invitation! Holy crap, I didn't think this was actually going to happen but here we are.

There are many reasons to be excited about this, but mostly it means that my general surgery program director didn't completely screw me over with his letter of recommendation. I had been worried about what it would say because the month I rotated on his service, everything went to hell.

There was one particularly bad week where on Wednesday, the home ortho program told me flat out they wouldn't match me, on Friday my dad called to say his cancer had reappeared, and the following Wednesday I got into a car accident and couldn't get my car fixed because I was on day 3 of working 12 days straight. So I was way off my game.

To top it all off, my chief (my PD's pet) and I got in a tiff that unnecessarily spiraled out of control.* To say I didn't make a good impression on my PD during that month is an incredible understatement. As such, I'm pleasantly surprised that the letter didn't turn out to be ruinous, and in fact, got me an interview.

I'm also very relieved to get the invitation from this particular program. I had become convinced that I had forgotten to apply there because it's listed under a different name on ERAS. I was beating myself up about overlooking them because they have a baller research opportunity for people who don't match, and I figured it'd be hard to explain that I wanted to do research with them when I didn't apply to their program in the first place. Luckily, that is not the case and not only did I apply there, but now I'm even interviewing for a PGY1 spot!

All in all, I'm incredibly happy that one program is willing to take a chance on me. My program is also being really good about giving me time off to travel, so not only do I get to go to the pre-interview dinner, but afterwards, I get to hang out with friends I have in the area. It'll be really nice to see old friends and get some time off from this general surgery nonsense, and hopefully recharge.

And I'm super excited that all my eggs aren't in one basket. I kinda sorta maybe have options. There's hope!

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* It started as me asking him to stop being an ass to me, but more importantly, to tell me when people were being admitted from the OR and to communicate their post-op plans. He really didn't appreciate me "telling him how to do his job" and was very vocal about it. Our conversation turned into a yelling match (mostly him yelling at me) and ended with me crying in my program director's office explaining everything that was going wrong in my life that week (as mentioned above).

The whole situation was no bueno and the timing couldn't have been any worse as I had just asked my program director to write me a letter of recommendation.