Match Day. A life changing day for medical students in ways that only those that have gone before them can possibly understand. As nerve racking as your wedding day and as important as graduation day from medical school, Match Day signifies that you really are on your way to achieving your goal of becoming a physician. Everyone’s Match Day story is different and you can imagine how many different stories from families exist about Match Day.
In medical school, my husband had a difficult time deciding what specialty to choose. After all, this was going to be a permanent decision and not one that he was going to embark on lightly. After toying with a few different specialties, he decided upon Otolaryngology. Unlike other specialties, Match Day for Otolaryngology is actually in January, not March. So instead of waiting in anticipation with classmates and celebrating afterwards, Match Day was a solitary revelation for my spouse. There was only one other medical student in his class that was trying for Otolaryngology, but results were not given in person, but by phone.
The day came for the results and we were excited, but extremely nervous. I don’t think there has been a time in my life where I was so anxious about something completely unrelated to my own actions. After all, the results of the Match determined where we were going to be living for the next five years. That’s a huge chunk of time in someone’s life and we were hoping for the best. My hopes were that were going to live somewhere warm after spending a few years in Boston. We wanted a city vs. the country because we both enjoyed all that a city offers from culture to endless amounts of entertainment to simple things like an abundance of places to choose from when wanting to go out and eat. The programs that he had interviewed at were so varied and including cities and towns in the Northeast as well as the South of the U.S. There was not going to be any way to predict the outcome of the Match and we knew that at this point, it was out of our hands.
We both headed off in our own direction that day knowing we would connect mid-morning for the results. I was in graduate school, but working during the day and had arranged for a conference call between my husband, the school, and myself. I probably should have stayed home because I simply could not get any work done that morning. Then the call came! I collected myself and grabbed a pen and paper to write the name down of the program. Why I did this, I don’t know. Perhaps it was for me to see it in black and white and to make it become real for me. Sitting quietly on the phone, I let the school speak briefly with my husband before the announcement. I felt more like an eavesdropper than a participant!
Maybe a drum roll would have been in order prior to the unveiling of the program name, but that didn’t happen. She merely said the name of the program, congratulated him, and hung up the phone. Before she hung up, I unexpectedly began laughing hysterically. I think now that probably wasn’t the best thing to do, but I couldn’t control myself. Out of the ten possible programs, we ended up matching at the coldest city of them all. The one we were going to was the one with the most snow and frigid temperatures. Hmm…I suspect a conspiracy here!
In retrospect, and my husband and I have discussed this many times since then, we would probably arranged the residency programs differently for the Match. He was absolutely convinced that he would go to one of his top choices and didn’t expect this as the outcome. Although we placed the others in an order we thought we would be pleased with should we end up there, we focused more on the programs themselves more so than the communities in which the program resided.
The remainder of Match Day is a blur, but I do believe that we began looking for any and all information about the new city that we were going to live in and moving information as well. As we close in on the end of residency, that day seems like ages ago, but still has a special place in our memories. It’s always a great topic for my husband to bring up when he feels like teasing me. We were recently at a dinner with a few attendings and he decided to bring up how I laughed hysterically when I found out where we were going. In the end, I am glad that he received the training he needed to become a successful surgeon and that enabled him to be accepted into a well-respected fellowship. If that means I have to endure a few cold winters, that’s fine, but I expect someday I will have few warm vacations as a token of my husband’s appreciation