Three tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan as an Army Ranger and even that didn’t prepare Tim Fuller for the anxiety that gripped him Friday as he waited for the word on where his life’s river next would flow.
“It was wrenching, he said. “I don’t know why they would want to do this to anybody.”
Fuller, one of 40 graduating seniors at Memorial Health and Mercer University School of Medicine, joined his classmates and medical students across the country in the annual event known as Match Day. That’s the day they discover where they will head for the next step in their medical education — their residency.
For Fuller, that meant Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, where the 32-year-old graduate of the U.S. Military Academy will spend the next five years training as a surgeon — a goal born of his time commanding troops in Iraq and Afghanistan
“It came from my experiences overseas, where I saw soldiers I was responsible for get injured and I didn’t know how to fix them,” Fuller said. “I started hanging out in the surgical trauma centers, and that’s how it started.”
Match Day is a day where the emotional yin meets the yang, as fraught with tense anticipation as it is with the promise of joy. It’s the day that puts the first punctuation on their four years in medical school, just as it offers a glimpse over the horizon at what awaits them in the specialty phase of the journey toward being a medical doctor.
And the answer comes in an envelope.
“On Monday, they found out whether they had matched (with a hospital),” said. Dr. Philip Malan, dean of the Savannah campus of the Mercer School of Medicine. “Today, everyone gets an envelope that tells them which hospital.”
The process is lengthy and somewhat convoluted, sort of online-dating meets college football’s Bowl Championship Series. Only with stethoscopes.
It begins when students decide which medical specialty to pursue. They apply to hospitals offering that specialty. Then come the interviews, where the students and the hospitals size each other up.
“Then the (prospective) residents submit a list, top-to-bottom, of hospitals where they’d like to do their residencies,” Malan said. “The residencies list the students they want, top-to-bottom, and a computer matches residents with residencies.”
Friday’s ceremony took place in the school’s William and Iffath Hoskins Center for Biomedical Research. Students and their families sat at round tables decorated with balloons and streamers.
As has become the custom of Match Day, many students dressed in costume. This year had a cinematic theme. There were clever choices, such as female students dressed as Rockford Peaches from “A League of Their Own,” and a man dressed as Darth Vader, who brought along a wee friend as young Luke Skywalker.
There was even the potentially regrettable choice, at least from a medical perspective, of the two students who dressed as “Dumb & Dumber.”
Each student was called to the front of the room, where each was handed the all-important envelope. Then back to the table to wait until the roll was completely called before their destinies were revealed.
At 12:39 p.m., the envelopes were opened and bedlam ensued. All 40 students matched.
None were happier than Savannah native Lindsey Boxxe, 26, and her classmate and fiance Nicholas Fiacco, 28.
Fiacco, a U.S. Navy officer, already knew he would be doing his residency in internal medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., along with classmate Matthew Middendorf, 27, also a naval officer. They celebrated by dressing Friday in flight suits and aviator sunglasses for a “Top Gun” motif.
Boxxe, however, entered the day not knowing whether she would have to do her residency near her fiance or far removed.
She opened her envelope to reveal her destination: Georgetown University Medical Center, right down the road from Walter Reed. Her specialty will be pediatrics.
“The wedding is the weekend after we graduate in May,” Boxxe said. “We’re set. We’re together forever.”
A Match Day miracle.