The Boy has been accepted to medical school!
He has applied to a dozen or so schools, and he’s waiting to hear from a few, each of which has its own appeal. But now he has an acceptance in his back pocket, which makes the waiting much easier.
None of the schools to which he has applied are in New York City, where he lives with his girlfriend, so he’ll have to make some adult decisions. No way around that. But at least he’s prepared; he’s far, far wiser than I was at his age, and his moral compass rarely fails.
He has been interested in medicine forever. He got certified and worked as an EMT while in high school, partly to see if he could tolerate gore. He had an enormous, full-color illustrated book of medical conditions—I used to call it the Big Book of Innards—and he’d read it for fun. He doesn’t seek gross-outs, but they don’t intimidate him, either.
Better than that, though, he actually cares about people. When he worked in a free clinic in Charlottesville, he worked with people who were dealing with some pretty terrible conditions and life events. His instinctive egalitarianism came through; he treated everyone with respect. I’d love to take some credit for that, but he had it even as a young child. When he was five, two-year-olds flocked to him. He was always tall for his age; something about a gentle giant puts people at ease.
When TB and TG were approaching college age, we told each of them that we’d do everything in our power to support them through four years of college, but anything after that would have to be on them. There’s no financial aid for retirement. They understood and got the message that finishing in four years would be a very good idea. He finished on time, and she’s on track to finish on time in May.
Med school definitely falls into the “after that.” I’m happy to help him make sense of some of the financial options—which have been made conspicuously and pointlessly worse by the current administration—but this is on him. He’s looking at some of the less lucrative specialties, but even those should pay well enough to take care of the loans.
(Fun fact: There’s an inverse correlation between the size of someone’s student debt and the likelihood of default on it. That’s partly because the highest loan balances accrue to the cardiologists of the world, who make more than enough to pay it back, and the lowest balances accrue to students who drop out of college without a credential. The popular press can’t seem to wrap its collective mind around this, but it’s true.)
He has spent the last few years doing clinical lab research, which is valuable in its own right. But he belongs with patients. I’m excited to see him get that chance.
I don’t mind being addressed as “Dr. Reed,” but it would be an absolute hoot to address him that way. And his future patients will be lucky to have him. Even if I am a little biased.
