1,000

This post is the confluence of three big events! First, I am thrilled to report that I matched at Stanford University Hospitals for preliminary medicine internship and anesthesia residency. I have worked with some of the faculty and residents there, and I think it will be the perfect fit for me. Like most Stanford graduates, I love the farm so very much and can't wait to go back. This next transition in my life will be exciting, eventful, and fun.

Like every other fourth year medical student in the country, I've known about the Match results for about two weeks (further blogs on that soon), but I decided to hold off posting until I reached today's blog - 1,000! This is the one thousandth blog since I began writing four years ago at the beginning of medical school. I had no idea how much work this would be, and indeed, it's been a real journey. Someday, I will have to go back and read and reflect on how much I've changed over medical school, and I am glad to have documented so much.

On a text-only XML file (standard encoding of electronic documents), this blog spans ~260 pages in print yet only takes 3MB of memory. At an average of half an hour per blog, I have spent approximately 500 hours or almost 3 straight weeks typing on blogger (with so few crashes - much appreciated). I've written or revised 95 poems or stories. Most of what I wrote was probably rubbish, but hopefully there are some gems in there. Thank you to all the readers who have taken the time to look at these ramblings and to those who have commented on my posts. You are much appreciated. Thank you to UCSF Synapse (the student-run newspaper) for sponsoring this blog and garnering readers for me. I am also proud to have made it this far without succumbing to placing ads on this blog.

I will, of course, continue to blog (I did have a mad desire to end the blog exactly on graduation at post 1,000 in an affirmation of my OCD controlling nature, but I realized as I neared this fateful number that it would not work out). And I will continue to blog through residency as well. So I thank you for staying with me and hope you continue to follow along.

The third and last event is that this blog falls one day before April Fool's Day. I did think of posting this tomorrow in some sort of strange irony that does not completely make sense to me, but I felt that it would leave my match results and this four-digit post ambiguous and wanting in substance.

Memories were made so we could have roses in winter.

Image of the Stanford postcard is from 1920, from Wikipedia, in the public domain.