Anticlimactic

There is a little celebration between intern year and the first year of anesthesia. They throw us a party and we have a few days off. It feels like a big accomplishment, making it through the purported "hardest year of medicine." But now that I'm almost done with my second year of residency, there's little fanfare. In fact, my schedule seamlessly moves from surgical ICU to obstetric anesthesia without a skip in heartbeat. It's okay; I don't particularly care for big markers of moving from one year or another, but after decades of celebrating the end of one academic calendar and the start of another, it feels a little funny.