intern year, here i come!

for any and all who are curious, here's what's happening with the whole residency thing:

I'm at Franklin Square Hospital's Family Medicine Residency, which, as far as I can tell, is pretty awesome. I'm going to get a solid Family Medicine education encompassing all aspects of primary care and basic hospital care in medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics, gynecology, geriatrics, and more. Plus, there's a strong emphasis on preventive medicine and public health among the faculty, so I will get a lot of great experience there. Medical students rotate through the program frequently, so I'll also have the opportunity to teach (which I would love to have as part of my future career in medical missions! I'll get to work at Baltimore County's Health Care for the Homeless, which is located right above one of the biggest shelters in the county (which happens to be on the FSHC campus.) Our patient population is apparently "very diverse" and "interesting"-- drawing on Baltimore City and the various counties surrounding the hospital.

The program is 3 years long, but I am considering adding an extra year for more obstetrics training (wherein I'll transfer over to the OB/GYN residency for a year.) They are also very close to adding a preventive medicine/family medicine combined residency, and I will have a hard time saying "no" to that when it comes around. I'm also thinking about about Via Christi Family Medicine's International Medicine Fellowship, where I'd get 6 months of training in the U.S. and 6 months of training overseas in preparation for medical missions.

A few frequently asked questions: "Residents" are folks who have graduated from medical school and have their M.D., but are not licensed in a particular specialty (and thus are pursuing their specialty training.) "Interns" are first-year residents. I do get paid (not much), and I am allowed to work a maximum of 80 hours a week, 16 hours per shift (I get to work up to 24-28 hours next year.) Most of my shifts will be 12 hours. I get four days off a month, although looking at my schedule I'll probably have closer to 5-6 days per month on most rotations.

My rotations are 4-week blocks as follows (block 1 started on 6/20, if that helps...): Nursery, ICU, Family Health Center (clinic), Night Float, FMI/Adult Inpatient Medicine, ICU, Musculoskeletal clinic, OB nights, Pediatrics Inpatient, Geriatrics, OB, amily Health Center (clinic), FMI/Adult Inpatient Medicine. More details about each rotation can be found here if you're curious.

We're still living in Sandtown and trying our best to be involved in New Song Community Church, which is downright awesome and a lot of why we chose to stay in Baltimore. We are working hard on something cool we plan on doing within the community that we'll tell everyone about soon! We still intend to do long-term medical missions to unreached peoples in Africa or the Middle East, doing clinical work and indigenous leadership development as part of a church-planting work.

So far, everyone that I've met at the Family Health Center is pretty cool. The faculty are all genial, intelligent folks who love to teach and are very open to us residents. My fellow residents are all cool, interesting people with a bunch of different interests and a strong commitment to helping the underserved. I start at 6:30am on Monday morning with Nursery, and I am very excited! This is gonna be a big change in a lot of ways, but I am eager to be challenged to my limits and learn all I can about medicine. I'll try not to totally drop off the face of the earth (at the very least, you can probably still expect some witty tweets every now and then.) Thanks to everyone who's been an encouragement or has prayed for me over the last few years-- Maggie & I have appreciated them and will still need them!

Here goes.