Can you go home again?

 So, my boyfriend has heard enough Grenada stories to want to see the magic.

In truth, I kind of want to see the magic.  I get a weird Stockholm Syndrome about my time on the island.

We're getting close soon.  The interhash (which new students should be invoked into) is in Trinidad and Tobago.  That's as close as you can get to Grenada without enrolling.  I really want to see what's become of us.  What's become of Caribbean medicine.

I'm not taking him to Grenada yet, because I don't have enough reason, but I am taking him to T&T, since I infected him with the hash.  We just got back from the Red Dress Run in New Orleans.  It's weird that the hash has taken me to more places than... medicine.

If anyone is still reading this, particularly any newbs that are arriving for medical school, what's it like?  Do you like it?  Is it modern?  Does IGA still run out of eggs?  Are there more restaurants?  Did you dive the Bianca C?  Are you still bringing Hershey bars to histology?  Do the locals hate us more or less?

Where to start?  Do you care about me?  Or the process?

For me?  My dad died.  Poorly, I believe.  The police in North Carolina were extremely delicate with me, but my time in forensics allowed me to read between the lines and know that they found what we'd roll our eyes about in autopsy and have it ruin our lunch.  His ashes are on my dining room table.  I have a necklace to hold them ordered, despite not believing in second chances or an afterlife, but hoping I'm wrong.

How do you say "I'm an atheist.  There's nothing after this, but I forgive you.  I forgive you 25 years of squandered chances, but I can't maintain a grudge after death, so now I only feel regret?"  I paid for his cell phone, and the plan, so I send text messages into the murk as if they mean something.  But I paid for AT&T, which means I paid for closure.

The boyfriend is a Cityiot by breeding, which makes him long for the outdoors.  We're planning a hiking trip in Maine.  This means the parts of my father that aren't in an "I'm sorry we didn't get along" pendant will be in a halcyon national park when I discreetly scatter him there.  In the meantime, I hefted the inconsequential weight of his ashes in the back of my car today.  I picked him up from the post office.  The ashes weighed so little, but he was in such poor health, it feels like I was hefting his actual weight. 

But you're not here for that; you're here for how doctoring from the Caribbean works out.

Well, it does.  I got grieve leave, despite not being sure whether I need it.  I'm treated exceptionally well.  I swap out procedures and vacation with another St. George's alumnus, who is a good person and doctor.  I get bonuses.  I was kept on through COVID when we had virtually no preventative workup work.  I/m so privileged that I got a shot on Christmas Eve of last year.  I'm looking forward to a booster.

I have vacation.  I have freedom.  And though I'd been once to Mexico, and once to the Philippines (diving) before medical school, the chaos of becoming a doctor in another country gave me the absolute gift of adaptability.

If you can get a US MD, do it.  Don't let snow or cost deter you.  But if you desperately want to be a physician, and foreign travel is your only option, it will change you.  It will age you.  It will allow you to be an adaptable creature where you previously weren't.  It will allow you to change habit and diet to adapt.

That's no bad thing.