Future Dr. James .

That's right. Future Doctor James. Today was the first day of that road. It's not that long, right? I mean, May 12, 2018 isn't that far away. I guess school hasn't technically started since I have orientation until Thursday. My first class and lab are on Friday. Everything will really pick up next week. And, after looking at the schedule, I believe them.

Orientation was fine and dandy for me. The professors were taking jabs at each other. We shared some laughs. A few tears  may have been shared as well. It was shaping up to be a fairly chill day. Everything changed when they introduced us to the color-coded codex that is our class schedule. Every hour of every day is blocked with nicely colored boxes that match a specific subject. I was sitting there thinking that this was going to be rough. Quite frankly, I was terrified. What had I gotten myself into?

The professor explaining the schedule didn't sugar coat things either; this is going to be a challenging four years. However, he quickly followed it up with a lot of reassurance. All the faculty is there to help me succeed. The professors may appear like my enemies come test time, but they are all on my side. And unlike Harry Potter with Severus Snape, I will actually know that they are trying to help me as I fight through the evils of mass memorization. Although I'm still scared about the amount of information that I'll be required to master, I feel like I won't be alone. I'll have classmates to commiserate with me, professors that will help me, and a loving and understanding wife in Sariah that will get me through these next four years.

If I had to choose a word for today, it would be reassuring.

Tornado Watch

We woke up this morning to a nice day: birds doing their chirping thing, sun doing its warming-the-earth thing, all good things.  By the time we got to church, it was much the same but with a couple of clouds on the horizon.  After church I noticed an alert on my phone. Tornado watch.  No sweat.*  The watch was for all of Eastern Tennessee, so we might see a storm but nothing major.

*Let's pause for a second and talk about my fear of tornadoes.  I've never lived somewhere with any chance of tornadoes, but I still have nightmares about them every few months.  I always have.  The concept of a tornado terrifies me.  I've never experienced a tornado watch before.  When I say "no sweat," I'm actually sweating quite a bit.  Like a pig.  Like a pig in a tornado.

I mentioned this alert to some people around me and they said, "Eh, no problem; it's the tornado warnings you have to watch out for!"  "Yeah," another agreed.  "It's been several years since we had a tornado around here."  (Several years??  Several?  Shouldn't that be NEVER??)

Later this afternoon I was napping on the couch when I woke to a strange alert noise on my phone.  The screen said: "TORNADO WARNING IN YOUR AREA.  TAKE COVER IMMEDIATELY."  What?  Take cover immediately?  Who says that?  What kind of a place is this?!

"JAMES!"  I holler.  But James is already up, having received the same alert.

"Where do we go?" he asked.

"The bathroom!  The bathtub!  No windows in there!" I scurry inside.  We have no basement, so this is the best place we have.

Me: "James!  I need towels because the tub is wet and I'm not sitting in water!"
James: "Grab what you need, you know, laptops or anything we'd really need."  (I step out long enough to get my laptop and decide I'm more interested in saving myself than anything else.)
Me, from the towel-lined tub: "James!  Get in here!"
James: "Here!  I got your shoes and socks." (James busily preparing as much as he can in the event of tornado destruction around but not including our bathroom.)
Me: "James!  Why are you not in the bathtub??"
James: "I got some water bottles."
Me: "James! I am not dying alone in a bathtub in a tornado!"

James, as it turns out, is much better at emergency preparedness than me.  I, as it turns out, am much better at plain old emergency than him.  We're sitting in our tub with the door safely shut (flying shards of glass - it can happen, you know) when....the power goes out.

James: "Should I open the door so we're not in the dark?"
Me: "You're not going anywhere."

So we sat in the tub in the dark, with winds and thunder and rain loudly pounding our house until the warning was over about 45 minutes later.  We tried to figure out if we can get radio on our phones to hear updates but we don't know what frequency.  We looked up statistics on cities and tornado deaths.  Fortunately, the last time someone in our city died from a tornado was in 1988.

When we come out, we see the sun again within another 15 minutes.  It rained 3" in that storm. The power came on about an hour after it went off.  It was calm for a few hours and then another storm rolled in.

Now it's 11 pm and we've been watching the sky flashing for the last hour or two, with more rain and thunder.  In the last 15 minutes there hasn't been a full second of space between lightning flashes; it's that continuous.  I've never been afraid of rainstorms before, not when I was inside.  It's nice to be curled up and know the storm can't get you.  But wait, what?  It can get you?  And blow you to Oz?  Tornadoes are a thing?  My nightmares were just foreshadowing!?

We just got a few new alerts in our area:  severe/dangerous thunderstorm and areal flood advisory (the tornado watch from this morning is still in effect until 2 am, by the way). The alerts have helpful tips and facts: "This storm is centered in your town.  Move to higher ground," "When driving in roads covered with water: turn around, don't drown," "Expect quarter-sized hail and winds in excess of 60 mph," "Torrential rainfall may lead to flooding," and "Lightning is one of nature's leading killers."  I feel reassured.

*     *     *

Edit: Monday morning. Nobody got blown away to Oz.  There may have been a tornado in our county yesterday after all (we live in Claiborne county) and 10 homes were destroyed in Speedwell, which is about 25 minutes away from us.  There are pictures on that link of the houses.

Advice for Applying

Sariah has been telling me that I should give some advice to others that are going through the application process that we just went through. In the off chance that someone actually finds this blog, here are things that I have learned through this experience.

First and foremost, you need to be certain that this is what you want to do. I haven't even started med school yet and I feel that I have already been stretched in ways that I wasn't expecting. To give a little background info, I'm not one of those people that always wanted to be a doctor. Although I knew that I wanted to do something where I could help others, I was torn about how to go about doing that. It was an honest struggle for me to commit myself to the idea of medicine. I was worried (and still worry albeit much less) about being able to make it in med school. I was scared about how the career would change my relationship with my family, especially with Sariah. Not only were those fears constantly circling around my inner dialogue, but I was seriously concerned about actually making it into school.

I was sucked into the trap of comparing myself to other students who had similar ambitions as mine. That wasn't helpful at all. Everyone else seemed to be succeeding with ease whereas I was struggling along the way. At any rate, I set aside my doubts, convinced and determined that I wanted to practice medicine. There is so much uncertainty throughout the application cycle that will really mess with your head if you aren't committed to this career path. Even if you are, this process can still mess with you, which leads me to advice tidbit thing number two: have a strong supporting cast.

Sariah has been such a help to me. Not only was she there to proofread essays and personal statements, but to help me keep believing in myself. She and the rest of my family were awesome at buoying me up during this last year. Without them, I don't think that I would have been able to make it to this point. I certainly wouldn't have maintained the same level of sanity after all was said and done.

Third, get your application in as soon as possible. I wish that I had done this. The longer you wait to turn in your primary and secondaries, the harder it is to get accepted due to rolling admissions. Take the time during the summer and get everything finished so that you don't have to stress during the Fall when you may be taking classes in addition to trying to make it into medical school. Learn from my mistake! I was finishing my last semester while still trying to finish the roughly 30 secondary application essay questions that I had.

Fourth, learn confidence, not arrogance. Believe in yourself. Seriously, you got this. You wouldn't be applying if you didn't think that you had what it takes. Don't doubt your abilities. That being said, don't be a cocky son of a gun that won't ever admit a mistake or an imperfection. Don't be that guy thinks he's all that and a bag of chips while advertising it to the world with a billboard complete with flashing lights. That is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the gist of it. Confidence lets people know that you are honestly aware of yourself, meaning that you know your limitations and more importantly your strengths. Arrogance makes me less trusting of that person and (if I'm being honest) annoyed with that individual. I'll tune them out.

Fifth and finally, the wait/alternate list is not the end of the world. I applied to ten schools. After writing all of the secondary essays and paying all of the fees (seriously, someone is making money somewhere off of these applications. It's ridiculous!), I was invited to interview at three schools. Of those three schools, I was wait-listed at two of them and rejected from the third, which I found very annoying especially being rejected after flying all the way out there and spending all of that money. I kind of felt like that Asian guy in "The Dark Knight" when Morgan Freeman's character tells him that the joint venture with Wayne Enterprises was off - "A simple phone call would have sufficed," pre-interview that is. Anyway, Sariah and I were stuck in this state of alternate list limbo. We were stressed out because we didn't know if I would have to apply again or if we would be moving across the country at some unforeseen time in the near future. It was not a pleasant experience, but I'm glad that it happened the way that it did. I received a phone call one day from my school explaining that I had been accepted. All of the anxiety and stress were gone. I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't lose hope about achieving your dream if you are placed on an alternate/wait list.

There are a slew of other little things that I could mention like save up money as this is expensive, or get your letters of recommendation taken care of early, but I think that these five things have helped me the most. To you who may be applying to med school, remember, you got this.

The South: Who Knew?

Things we've learned about where we live:

• What fireflies look like!  Incredible!  We've never seen anything like it before!
• Humidity + Sariah's hair = not friends.
• Kentucky, which we're about 20 minutes from, has no sales tax.  Tennessee, which we live in, has no income tax.
• You have to pay tax on purchases from Amazon if you live in Tennessee.
• "The South" is loosely defined.  If you go to the Wikipedia page, you'll see a cool map that shows which states are more or less often referred to as the South.  I thought it was pretty cool.
• There are lots and lots of different churches here.  Lots.
• There are lots and lots of different accents here.  All wonderful, though!
• All new wildlife.  I saw a frog, a bobcat (the feline, not the construction vehicle), and some sort of gopher/prairie dog but bigger this week.
• Did I mention the fireflies?!

Our Great(?) Moving Adventure

We're here in Tennessee now!  Everyone kept telling us that this move would be a wonderful adventure, we'd love it, and we can tell our children about it (except I'd never heard my parents' own early marriage moving story until we were in the middle of our own, so maybe these stories are ones you hide deep in your soul until you need to make someone feel better about their own experience).  But no, it was pretty rough, thanks to our truck.  We'd saved up for a while to afford this move and to afford to buy furniture, etc. when we got here, and it's a good thing we did!

Two days before we left, our truck died in a drive-through in Provo.  Our mechanics didn't know what the problem was, but they did say that our spark plugs and wires looked pretty bad so we got all those replaced.  After lots of prayers, we started our drive.

We were driving across Wyoming on Thursday and when we stopped to get gas, our car died right there on the off ramp.  We tried calling some mechanics but they were full until Monday.  Finally it started after cooling off and we went to an auto parts store, where Bill checked our engine out.  We felt very scolded as Bill shook his head and face-palmed over the state of our transmission fluid.  "Dirty," he said.  "And burnt.  But it should get you to Colorado.  I hope."

It did get us to Colorado...and there the car died again while in some stop and go traffic.  Here we are by the side of the road.  We really enjoy the motto on the side of our trailer: "America's moving adventure!"

Here's James pretending he knows how to fix our car.

We let it cool down again (and prayed pretty hard) and made it to a mechanic near my parents' house.  After checking things out, our mechanic Oliver said that he was 60% sure the problem involved our fuel pump.  While that was neither reassuring nor cheap, we changed our fuel pump and got a transmission flush.

We got to see some really beautiful things while we drove.  We saw two zebras grazing in a pasture in Kansas.  (No joke.  Zebras.  Two of them!)  Here's the St. Louis bridge, which James was pretty excited about driving on:

All was well until just past St. Louis when the truck shuddered violently while we stopped for lunch.  The nearest mechanic was a dealership that said some of our brand new wires had melted in our hot engine and needed to be replaced.  We got going again a few hours later and our truck has behaved ever since!  We drove through some impressive thunderstorms (or maybe just the same storm many times?) and got to see the widest rainbow I'd ever seen (diameter-wise, that is).  We also saw both ends of the rainbow at different times, which was fun.

Now we're here in Tennessee at our new place!  It's a duplex and is much more fun than I'd expected.  There's not a stitch of carpet in it, but lots of nice wood laminate flooring.  We have two bedrooms now, as well as a bigger kitchen and some yard space.  Whoever lived here before had a dog with a robust digestive system, and I'm sure the grass will grow all the greener because of it.

Our trip was hard, but mostly because of truck and monetary worries, and we've had many miracles in that regard and have faith that things will be okay.

Things we learned on our trip:
-St. Louis is so named because French explorers were big fans of King Louis IX around the time it was discovered and named.
-Apparently the Cumberland Gap (approximately where we live) is a big deal.
-Tennessee is very green and sprawling.  There aren't a lot of fences between yards, just lots of rolling areas that merge and are dewy and open.
-Our town is very, very small. We do have a Sonic, though!  We even have a Red Box!
-We actually live in New Tazewell, not Tazewell, but they're kind of the same thing.
-There are no pots of gold at the ends of rainbows. Wouldn't that have been helpful?
-If your semi's trailer breaks in half on the highway and loses all its cargo, it blocks traffic for a very, very long time. 
-Jim Dale is an excellent reader of Harry Potter.
-Faith and prayers are a wonder!

And now we're here!