Four Years Ago Last Week...

I should have started this blog four years ago.

Four years ago last week, D and I packed up an overnight bag and our good old pup, Sage, into our 1991 Ford Escort and drove the nearly 5 hours from our house in Pittsburgh to Lewisburg, WV for his first, and as far as we knew at that point, only medical school interview.

Next week is the osteopathic match. On Monday, we will log in to a website, and see the words that decide the next three years, if not more, of our life.  We're are so, so fortunate that the top half of his list are hospitals and locations we like. But since I should have started recording this crazy journey four years ago, and since I won't have much to say about our current situation until next week, I think I'm going to recap some parts of the journey that brought us this far. So back to Lewisburg, WV.

We drove into this tiny town of maybe 4,000 people, that I had oddly already been to a time or two before. We stayed at a Super 8 that allowed pets, and despite the king bed, still didn't have enough room for the two of us plus Sage. Best damn dog ever.

The next morning, we checked out of the hotel, and I drove (poorly - it was a stick shift car and I am not great at manual) Dave to the interview. Sage and I killed time in the tiny town. I window shopped and checked out potential apartments, so that if this ended up being our future, I would have a feel for  what we'd be looking at. They were incredibly bad. So bad that even though we are barely able to afford to keep our house in Philadelphia at 55 degrees most days in winter, I still shudder when I think of those apartments: cinder block squares, with old Native American looking print couches, a burnt out lightbulb in the bathroom, and a stained mattress that the landlady offered to leave for us if we rented the place. No, thank you, I told her.

The interview went well. We went home and watched the Steelers win the SuperBowl the next weekend.  Weeks later, we got a letter that accepted D into the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine. With no other interviews on the horizon at all, we had two choices: fork over the $3000 deposit to ensure that Dave went to med school somewhere, or risk him getting no more interviews and going to med school nowhere. We chose the somewhere option, sent them the check, and prayed like crazy.

More of our crazy life next time.