Pediatric EM Fellowship .. the beginning of a new season

Dave is finishing up his third year as a Pediatric Resident. He is almost half way through his final year and I could not be more excited for him. He has worked so hard for SO long!! At the end of last year, he decided that he wanted to specialize even further by becoming a certified Pediatric Emergency Medicine physician, which means MORE TRAINING!!! That’s right, med-school and residency apparently weren’t enough, so fellowship, here we come!! The Emergency Medicine (EM) Fellowship is another 3 years of training. It also means that we have to move. Even with the new Pediatric ER opening at Shands, a fellowship program won’t be underway for another few years. It’s a bit surreal to think of moving at the moment. We’ve been in Gainesville since college. It certainly feels like home to us, but we are trusting in the Lord to lead us in the right direction to a new home for the next 3 years.

In July, Dave applied to 20 EM Fellowships. Last month the interviews started rolling in. Dave would literally call me everyday at lunch and say, “Got another interview.” He has 11 on the calendar. EM is a pretty competitive fellowship and Dave wasn’t sure how many programs he would hear back from. I on the other hand knew those programs would love him! We definitely feel blessed to have that many interviews on the calendar and can’t wait to hear the news on November 30th just where exactly we will spend the next 3 years of our lives.

Just like residency, fellowship is a match program. That means that after all the interviews are said and done, we will rank the programs he interviewed from 1-11 (best to least) and the programs will rank their applicants. All rankings get submitted into a computer system that matches the numbers. Hopefully we will get one of our top 3 programs, but it’s really up to God at that point and we are just praying that he is already preparing and paving our way!

Last Monday Dave set out for Jacksonville for his first interview. He is pretty familiar with Jax since as a Med-Student he spent a few months doing rotations there. It’s affiliated with Shands and UF here in Gainesville. He would spend 70% of his time working in the ER at Shands Jax and 30% of his time working in the children’s ER at Wolfson. Our best friends in the whole world live in Jacksonville, which are a HUGE perk to the program there.

I got to travel with Dave to his second interview in Norfolk, Virginia. I was impressed with this program before we even left for his interview – mainly because they said a suit was unnecessary and asked him to wear Khaki's and a polo. Now, that’s my (and Dave’s) kind of program! The town seemed nice and my good friend, Emily, from college lives there so that’s a nice perk as well.

We had a nice mini-vacation while in Norfolk. Finley traveled with us and Cori stayed with the grandparents. It was nice to spend some time with just Finley, but of course, we missed Cori like crazy! We stayed at a super cute Bed and Breakfast called the Page House Inn.

Virginia Beach is only 20 minutes from Norfolk. How crazy is it that we would actually live closer to the beach in Virginia than we do here in Florida! Friday we spent the day walking along the boardwalk in VA Beach at the Neptune Art Festival. It was tons of fun!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They were having a sand castle building contest and it was insane!! Professional sand castle builders --- who knew there was such a profession?! It definitely takes some skill! Each “builder” was given 24 hours (8 hrs a day for 3 days) to compete their castle. They had 2 hours left on their 3rd day when we were there. Check out these pictures!!

 

On the plane ride home Dave and I made an excel spreadsheet listing each program he will be interviewing with. We wrote down the things that are important to us about each program (well, only the two he has interviewed with so far) and we will be filling in the rest of the programs as he visits them. We are also putting them in the order in which we like them as we go.. that way when interviews are said and done, we should already have our rank list complete and just can double check our criteria and PRAY. There will be LOTS of prayer accompanying this decision. We could NOT do it with out the help of God because His plans are greater than ours and we want to make sure our will aligns with His.

Dave will be interviewing the entire month of October and I’ll update as we go. It’s definitely an exciting time, but scary too. Praying for God’s will ALL OVER this season of life!