Match Day for fellowship was a few weeks ago, and dear readers, your Axis got his #1 choice!
The fellowship matching process is identical to the residency matching process, which is nice for the sake of familiarity but painful because it involves repeating a long, expensive, and tiring process.
Matching for fellowship was exciting mostly because it indicates that residency will soon end and I will begin training in a field I am actually interested in, cardiology. A third year of medicine residency lies ahead of me, but the end is now in sight.
Exciting and motivating as it is to see that end now, it reminds me yet again that I have will have had to wait several years before I can be immersed in the field of my true interest. Unlike my counterparts in, say, neurosurgery, urology, obstetrics/gynecology, psychiatry, or radiology, all of whom started training in their fields immediately after medical school (save one year of internship, of course), I have to suffer through three long years of general internal medicine before reaching cardiology. Three years of low back pain, diarrhea, runny nose, GI bleeding, and countless other symptoms/illnesses that I simply do not care about. It's hard to be good at what you do when you don't like what you do.
Regardless, the end of general training is near and soon the game of sub-specializing and sub-sub-specializing will start. I will now be Axis, second-semester senior.
