Page 28 of French Kiss

11

The End

Year Three - June

San Francisco

Graduation from residencywasn’t like graduating from college or medical school. There was no big stage or ceremony with parents and friends in attendance. It was more like a lunch in a hotel banquet room with a lot of the doctors in the department and all the various residents. I’d told my parents that not only did they not need to fly out but it would be weird if they did.

The event was nice enough, with a catered dinner, wine poured by bored-looking waiters, and a few awards and speeches by various people from the hospital. Maddox and I almost missed the ceremony. We’d both scrubbed in on a case four hours earlier, and no one had any idea there would be a mass on the patient’s kidney that would lead to hours in the operating room, carefully removing it and monitoring vital signs, before the surgeon could close up the incision. We were excited about what we’d just witnessed and exhausted from the hours on our feet and the concentration the case had required.

Doctor Orchester was presented with a teaching award, which we found hilarious. After accepting it, he gave Josh an award for Best Diagnostician among all the residents. Josh deserved it. He was undoubtedly the best at solving the most difficult cases we were presented with, and he’d even figured out that a patient was suffering from Guillain-Barré Syndrome when several other doctors had missed the diagnosis. I was awarded a Patient’s Choice award. I hadn’t even known it existed, but apparently, it was based on patients’ ratings of the care they received, so I was proud that I’d made an impression.

Emotions were running high. We were scared to be entering the real world of doctoring after so many years in training, and of course we wondered if we were good enough. And those who were continuing on with more training were starting to feel the burnout that came with accepting that another three years of fellowship would mean more nights on call, more potentially sadistic attending physicians, and no real end in sight. That, coupled with the need to say goodbye to each other after we’d been together in the trenches and formed such tight bonds, was making us alternately emotional, sentimental, and a little codependent.

That night, a small group of us had dinner at an Asian fusion restaurant, where we celebrated the fact that we’d survived our three years.

“Okay, just one fucking toast,” Heidi said, laughing because she was known for making multiple toasts.

“For now,” Maddox said, flashing her a smile. He topped off his glass of red wine and held his glass up.

“I just want to say I fucking love you guys, and I will haunt each of your doorsteps next year, no matter what my attendings say. They’re just going to have to give me time off to visit you all.” Heidi was moving to Minneapolis to do a two-year fellowship in infectious diseases with a renowned doctor who was working on several vaccines. She got euphoric when she talked about the work Dr. Vishwanadha was doing and the work she’d be doing under his tutelage. But if her drunken toast was to be believed, he’d have to factor all of us into her schedule.

“We love you too,” Maddox said without irony.

“I just hope that when we all graduate and move far away from each other, we’ll stay in touch. Can we make a pact or something?” Heidi said.

“I’m in,” Maddox said.

“Me too. Goes without saying I’m never losing touch with all of you,” Josh said.

The sadness was already setting in, the unavoidable realization that in two months’ time, the world that had become so comfortable was about to end. Despite the long hours and lack of sleep, my residency had been the best three years of my life. That was entirely due to my group of friends. I couldn’t imagine how the next phase, however it unfolded, could possibly compare.

“Let’s not think about it too much. We still have a little time before we all split up,” Karim said, leaning in toward our side of the table so he could fit us all into a selfie. We squished together to make room for him, and I almost fell off my chair. Then we all huddled together to take a few more pictures, looking up at the phone so we wouldn’t have a chance to catch the sadness in each other’s eyes. “Heidi and I will be here all summer, so whoever’s not traveling can hang with us.”

“I don’t think anyone’s traveling except Hannah.”

“And I wouldn’t have planned the trip if I’d known you were all gonna be such bums,” I said. I’d assumed everyone would take the opportunity, after being done with the boot camp of residency, to take time off to travel. “But when else are we gonna have the chance to have more than a couple days off at one time?”

“True,” Heidi said. “I’m the lowest on the totem pole in the practice. If I get time off, it’ll be whenever the other docs decide they can spare me, which will probably be never for the first couple years.”

“My fellowship is insane. I don’t think I get a break.” Karim looked at Heidi.

I knew they didn’t want to think about how they were going to manage the next two years while Heidi was at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and Karim was joining a group at Cedars Sinai with me. There would be some twenty-four-hour visits that would mainly consist of time on planes or in the airport, but they could probably make it work.

“Well, I’m taking a vacay,” Maddox said. I couldn’t see his face from where I stood, so I didn’t know if he was expecting a reaction from the announcement.

“Nice,” said Karim. “Good on you, bro.”

That was how I came to learn that Maddox and I would be in Europe at the same time.

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