Goodbye, Madigan

After crashing at Rachel and Jason's last night, I got up this morning and headed over to Madigan for the last time, for my out-processing, which is really just wandering around the hospital and getting signatures for doing things like turning in my white coat and badge.

This is a picture of Madigan I pulled off of Wikipedia. It's actually a fairly old pictures; the short buildings between the hospital and Mt. Rainer is the Annex (otherwise known as Old Madigan), which is where I was working. I know it's an old pictures because there are about half as many buildings there now. My building is near the middle of this group, which is now the edge of the group of buildings (there's a large field there now).

After a month at Madigan, I will have to admit that I am going to miss the place, especially things like always being able to find a parking place, hanging out with the interns, listening to LTC Wiesen talk about making President's Hundred on the rifle (he's one of the top 100 riflists in the country), trying not to laugh at the guys getting lost on their way to STD clinic, running on base in the morning when it's still cool, and enjoying the view of Mt. Rainer. However, there are also things I'm not going to miss, like that windowless box of an office I shared with the interns (windowless and without air conditioning), the strange animosity amongst the residents, documenting everything in AHLTA, and the like. Overall, it was a good month, and if it weren't for the fact that the residency program is focused on the things I find most boring about preventive medicine (public health department-type stuff), I would really enjoy doing my residency here. We'll see how things go at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research next month.

Anyway, after out-processing, I drove back down to Camas and proceeded to spend the entire afternoon stuffing my junk into suitcases so Mom and I can begin our cross-country trip back to Ohio tomorrow. And when I say stuffing my junk into suitcases, I'm not joking. I have three suitcases, three book bags, four boxes of wine bottles for Adrienne, and still more stuff that will just go into whatever crevice we can find in the car. That's a lot of junk.

See? A lot of junk. Hopefully it will all fit into the car tomorrow.