Tara thought I should write a blog to update everyone on what I do and why exactly I had to move us 3000 miles to do it. Well, I can't tell you, it's secret army stuff.
Ok, so that's not entirely true.
I officially started my Family Medicine residency out here at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma in July and began seeing patients both in the hospital and in the clinic almost immediately. It's a very weird thing to go from one day being a medical student, having no responsibilities and becoming very good at PlayStation3, to being a resident, responsible for the decision making process in your patients' health.
Every month is different during residency. And I don't just mean in the "you never know what's gonna walk through the door" way, but rather, an example: The first month was Family Medicine inpatient and outpatient stuff, this month is all Pediatric Inpatient with a half day of Family Medicine Clinic appointments sprinkled in per week, and next month my job is to welcome all the newborns into this world with their first physical exam and making sure they are doing alright initially. It goes from there: ENT/Opthomology month, Labor and Delivery month, Family Medicine Inpatient month, Sports Medicine month, Cardiac Care Unit month, Dermatology month, and so on and so forth for the next 3 years.
It's a really interesting process and creates a lot of opportunity to make mistakes...er,uh, I mean learn through doing. So far it really has been a great experience, albeit the long hours and a STEEP learning curve.
Now for a fun story about car shopping before I wrap this thing up...
Tara and I are in the market for a new car, not necessarily new,new... just new to us. We only have one and it's becoming a hassle for both of us, especially since my work is now 40 mins from the house AND traffic can turn that into 2 hours rather quickly around 5pm. So, we went to SEVERAL places and test drove a few cars here and there and ultimately decided we liked the new Kia Sorrentos the most (plus they are at least $10,000 cheaper than comparable cars of Ford or Toyota). We looked again and again and on our third visit to a certain Kia dealership which will remain nameless, we finally decided on a 2011 Kia Sorrento that was Snow Pearl White. It was nice, they even let us take it home for one night and it sat in our garage and looked beautiful and then we took it back and after 3-4 more hours of deliberation and price negotiation we had decided we were going home with that car at a very reasonable price.
After we signed every piece of paper and were ready to swipe some credit cards, it was discovered that this particular car was RDR'ed last month. Now this acronym means nothing to me, but apparently to them it means that they were a few cars short of being the #1 Kia dealership of it's type last month and marked a few of them down as SOLD, even though they still sat on their lot unpurchased, so it looked better on paper and they could take first prize. This would cause no issues at all except that the cars marked as sold no longer qualify for any dealer rebates, which means that all those nice rebates that made this deal a good deal no longer applied.
So puff up your stats to become #1, at the expense of the customers ability to get the discounts they are entitled to with the purchase...
I know, sketch, right?!
The resolution of this story is we walked out since it was now way out of our comfort price range. They called us personally to apologize, which was appreciated, and also to tell us they could find us another non-RDR'ed version but it would take a couple days. I may have been jaded by the first experience but I lost just a hint of trust for the dealership as a whole and respectfully declined their offers.
So we had to walk away, once again forced to carpool for the time being and back in the market for a new car...not new,new, just new to us.
