Game, Set, and Match

Ben Ferguson -- Match Day is upon us. On Thursday, March 20, thousands of medical students and recent graduates will find out where they’ll be spending the next several years of their lives in training. Some will have their prayers answered, some their hearts broken.

I literally would not be more excited or antsy if I were going through it myself, but I am not. My original classmates, those of the graduating class of 2008, are. These are people that I’ve known for four years and who have become some of my best friends. They are people that, at least for two years, went through the grind of medical school with me, took naps with me, helped me, taught me, and understood me. They, like me, began as lambs naive to medicine and have now emerged from the wards speaking a completely different language, one that feels so far removed from our pathophysiology and clinical skills courses that ended just a few years ago.

I remember an encounter I had with a former classmate shortly after we parted ways and I started grad school. “What are you on these days?” I asked -- that’s all anyone asks who’s trying to catch up with old colleagues. “Gens, Q4. Not too bad. After this it’s smooth sailing until winter,” he said. I nodded in acknowledgement as if I knew what the hell he was talking about. He had a partial beard and was wearing mismatched scrubs; I couldn’t even begin to tell you whether he was on a rough surgical service or had a few too many medicine patients, and I didn’t ask.

I see other former classmates randomly, walking down the street in Chicago, or at a street market, or reading books as they hustle through the bowels of the hospital (here, they truly are bowels, ones that have just been emptied in preparation for colonoscopy, perhaps), or running by the lake, or darting onto AIM for a quick semblance of a social life, or during pickup poker games during which everyone drinks Capri Suns in place of perhaps more exotic beverages because they need to be up at 4am to make grand rounds the following morning. They all look the same, not the same as before but the same as each other. They are unexpectedly awake, and they are unexpectedly alive. The ones on surgery don’t look any different from the ones on family medicine or on psychiatry, save for slight changes in facial hair upkeep. They largely do the same things outside of the hospital as they always have, albeit in less quantity. They are fighting to stay alive and to become doctors, and they are doing fantastically.

Fantastically enough, even, that in less than a week, they too will experience that rush of emotion that dozens of classes before them have felt, emotion that will fill an entire auditorium palpably as if surrounded by a thick, saline-filled ether. It’s truly one of the most incredible experiences I have in a given year, but this year will be even more special. I know them. I have listened to their dreams and watched them -- the dreams and the dreamers -- take shape and morph and evolve. I cannot wait until I too have that opportunity. But, for now, I’ll settle for getting as close as I can to theirs.