Match Day was successful

I already sent a mass email to everybody about where I matched, and I am generally careful about posting very specific information about my family and me on our blog series. However, for the sake of completeness, I will talk a little bit about Match Day (March 16.)

The night before the match, I was reading over those silly student doctor forums online where everyone who posts has a rank list that reads something like this: 1) Massachusetts General, 2) Washington University, 3) Johns Hopkins. My rank list did not look like that. Somebody had illegally posted the list of programs that had unfilled positions. Technically, this list should only have been available to NRMP participants that did not match successfully. But anyway, the list was there, and I saw it, and it said that for U. Pitt Internal Medicine Primary Care, which was my #2 choice, it had matched 0 out of 4 positions. Which meant two things:

1.) I matched to my #1 choice, or
2.) I did not match to my #1, and U Pitt hated me so much after the interview that they would rather scramble than have me be part of their program.

I didn't think #2 was the case. I didn't remember royally screwing up that day. So I was pretty excited about the whole night and couldn't sleep until 2 am. The next day we had a nice Match Day ceremony at my school, where everybody gets an envelope with the paper in it that said where they matched, and we all open it at the same time. And sure enough, I found out that things worked out really nicely.

So we don't have to move, we don't have to switch daycares, we don't have to change very much of anything. This is a bigger deal than we let ourselves believe before opening that envelope. We were mentally preparing to pack up our house and move. This past weekend, it really hit that everything worked out, and to celebrate we bought a huge Costco fruit tart (which my mom ate at least half of) and a box of cream puffs.