Residency Match Day 2017

This past St. Patrick’s Day was also the 2017 Match where more than 30,000 applicants open a letter revealing to them their Residency training program in over 4,700 Programs. After four long years of medical school, in the days, hours, and moments before the letter opening, medical students are filled with apprehension knowing that their immediate future is unknowable. And for every student who gets their first choice program, there will be another who gets their last choice, and some may not match this season as well. After 20+ years of formal education and four intense years of dedicated scientific and clinical study, we all cling onto some form of faith in order to open that Damn envelope!

Hope is littered and hidden throughout the human experience. It allows us to bear the unknown, the uncertainty, the delayed gratification and even suffering.

At 9am March 17th, 2017 I gathered with Lauren Mills and Jeff Yeh, my friends and fellow survivors of USC’s first MD/MPH accelerated program, to open our envelopes. As we held our cardinal and gold envelopes with a fancy little gold sticker seal, my fiancée Jaycee, mom Ellyn, mother-in-law Mel, and brother Jason stood beside us in equal anticipation…

[Letters Open]

Hilo! We matched into our first choice Family Medicine Residency program!! Wow, it was such an emotional day. And this past week has been nothing short of a dreaming, talking and more dreaming about what the years ahead have in store. They will be some rough training years ahead paired with a new chapter of marrying the love of my life, starting a new life in a new land, and becoming the people we want to be to our community, family and friends, both in Hilo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Orange County and beyond!

• Lauren and Jeff also matched into their first choice programs as well in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and internal medicine at LA County, respectively!

(Those are some happy faces!)

• Here are some more happy faces who all placed into their first choices as well! (Left to Right: Dr. Jo Marie Reilly, Pooja, Missy, Myself, Erin and Janice)
• And I couldn’t have found my call to Family Medicine without Dr. Jo Marie Reilly herself! My family medicine mentor and preceptor throughout my entire medical school journey. She serves with a servants heart and a leaders will and taught me to practice Wholistic care while curing sometimes and healing always.

Did you know that when Jaycee and I began the interview season, we thought we wanted to be at least in California and most likely in Los Angeles. In fact, Harbor UCLA, Kaiser Sunset and Long Beach Memorial were at the top of our list. And we also very much liked Loma Linda, Scripps Chula Vista and could even be happy way north at Kaiser Vallejo. So many strong and amazing family medicine programs producing so many valuable physician leaders our country desperately needs! The larger family medicine residency training network of institutions in California and along the whole West Coast is a backbone to building a strong national health care system that values and integrates outpatient and inpatient care. Family Docs are those guys and gals that wear many hats in different decades and different places to fill the needs of the health care system. We are primary care and I couldn’t be happier to be entering this hard, but hopeful field.

But when Jaycee and I visited Hilo, something “shined”. I use this word intentionally, as “shining” is a phenomenological term. Phenomenology is a branch of continental philosophy with incredible power in the sciences and health care setting — that I am very excited to integrate into Family Medicine practice and research. On the most literal level, Hilo was the one site where the faculty were familiar and excited about the work Carl Rogers did in integrating phenomenology into his therapeutic work with unconditional positive regard. Another powerful phenomenological term is “fit”. And “fit” at the end of the interview season was why Jaycee and I ranked it first. Sure there are more established, even stronger residency programs in California.

But fit! And it was simply the fit of wanting to work alongside the residents and faculty at Hilo, fitting with them personality wise, but also with the vision and momentum of the program. And the program fits well into the community and the greater setting of a shortage of health care professions in more rural communities in Hawaii and throughout the continental US and the globe. I am a huge advocate in health care as a human right. But I am also radically realistic and realize that when people say this, it’s often more of a dream or preference than a real commitment. I entered medicine knowing I wanted to serve the poorest of the poor as I learned from working alongside Mother Teresa sisters to serve homeless Navajo men on the reservation and AIDS and cancer dying hospice patients near San Francisco. And I knew entering medicine would entail sacrifice that sometimes does not make sense to my peers. Medicine itself is very hierarchical and status driven. If you think of it as a pyramid with the surgeons and critical care specialists at the top, my life has always been one of walking in the other direction towards the edges of the pyramid, even to the outskirts. Not that I think either choice is wrong or right. But my life, has been different. And Hilo reminded me most of how I can continue practically following that call.

And then there was Jaycee, who while my medical student friends might say “oh that’s why he’s going to Hilo”, did have a part in this story. If we didn’t find each other five years ago and fall in love, then yeah, I wouldn’t have interviewed in Hawaii. But like I said before, we were ready, prepared and excited to stay in California. But we had to give Hawaii a chance, and we did without much expectations. As we left Hilo, we visited the famous Two Ladies Kitchen with traditional hand-made mouth-watering remind-you-of-the-real-japanese-culture mochi! The customer and tourist in front of us asked the two ladies if they could come and take a picture with her. When it was our term, one of the ladies asked where we were from. Jaycee told them about my interview and when she heard I was from USC, her face lit up. She told us how thankful they were that I would even think of interviewing in Hilo and that she hopes I would stay. She said they really need good doctors here. And she insisted on giving us a free dozen manju! We told her it was okay, but she insisted and called out her sister to meet us. We didn’t just feel like celebrities — which actually turned us off — but our hearts were warmed by this mutual embrace of members of the community equally committed to each other. In fact, health care is dealing with an epidemic of burnout and suicide among physicians. The scientific literature shows that physicians who can maintain meaning in their practice are resilient and immunized against burnout. I am convinced that this meaning is hidden all around, but that there is a special opportunity to reforge and revive the largely decayed corpse of the mythological “doctor-patient relationship” that our Medical Industrial Complex is built upon. Jaycee in law and me in medicine, we hate when people call us a “power couple” — so don’t call us that unless you understand our heart! ;) We want to find a community we can serve in and become members of. Not leaders or celebrities. But co-investors in a shared life. And the moment the two ladies embraced us and us them in that “shining” interaction, we knew we had encountered a special place.

We also heard how patients in Hilo were putting ads in the newspaper for doctors! The public and private healthcare systems are failing our rural communities and this is an outcry that no health care legislation in an of itself can fix. It is the heart of medicine, and the revival of physicians willing to go to far and strange places that will revive not only rural health care, but suburban and urban health care as well. It’s easier to serve the poor with nice funding streams and nice standards of living. But for Jaycee and I — we aren’t saints and were also not stupid or idealistic — we just FIT!

Thank you Hilo Medical Center and Hilo community for choosing us! We are absolutely excited to serve, laugh, eat and go beach with you as we journey through this shared and strange life together!