June 2022
I’m sorry I didn’t come to your birthday weekend. I’m sorry I bailed on your family’s party in the winter too. I really am sorry. I’d say I’m sorry about not acknowledging you birthday when we originally met, but your birthday is the first of July. An atrocious birthday — we were all just tepid little interns on our first day.
You were an intern doing a transitional year internship before fleeing to greener pastures in the world of anesthesia. Life was.., idk, predetermined. I was an unmatched lost boy trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life. We started intern year in the ICU together. We did our first intubations, lines, etcetera as doctors together. You took a picture to commemorate this. We joked around and wrote our notes together. We’d go on long walks around the hospital on slow afternoons to just goof around and vent and bond. Funny thing is, I scored like fifty points higher than you on Step 1 yet you were the better intern, the better doctor. You made me want to be smarter. I still remember how torn up you were when your thirty-something patient was put on ECMO and eventually died. We did chest compressions and watched people die together.
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