This Might Get A Little Heavy....

When I told Zach that I was in the midst of writing this post he looked at me and said, "um ok...I'm scared." Funny guy, no need to be scared :)

If you want to commit to reading this(I know you are hemming and hawing Marcy...it's a lot of words) I suggest you get a cup of coffee and bare with me ;)

Moving right along.....

So Zach's a doctor. Yup, a doctor. As in, girls always "dream" about marrying a doctor.

The movies always make it seem so desirable, that having "all that money" is all it takes to be happy with your man. They never get into the nitty-gritty. 

Being a doctor's wife is not the fairytale everyone thinks it is....

not to be confused with my marriage to Zach not being a fairytale...that is! The two are kinda separate... (ok, now I'm getting confused...I'm just going to keep writing and hope you stay with me on this!) 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to sound ungrateful, bitter or scary, but I wanna inject a little reality into peoples perception of the whole thing. 

Here's a little "Keepin' It Real" timeline for y'all...

First--four years of undergrad(usually there's some nice debt that comes with this)

Second--the MCAT...a big standardized test to see if you even qualify for Med School.

Third--the whole business of applying to Med School. 

This in and of itself is a stupidly hard process...coming from Canada, it was even harder(there is only one Med School in our Province and out-of-province schools are even harder to get into)

Fourth--comes med school (assuming you get in....factor in some possible rejections and waiting another year to apply again, it's what Zach went through)...it's a crazy time filled with classes, cadavers, sleepless nights, and long hours in the hospital(in the 3rd and 4th years) and ALL that is accompanied by some nice accumulating debt....oh and a butt-load of tests!

Zach attended an out of country Med School in the Caribbean, so that added a nice flare of you-have-to-leave-your-family-and-go-somewhere-in-which-you-know-no-one-and-it's-going-to-be-super-hard-and-expensive-to-travel-home-and-see-family-and-friends to the already crazy pressures.

He(I was there with him) did the first 2 years in Grenada and the second 2 in the USA.

Living in Grenada, was (If I'm being honest) one of the hardest things I've ever done...we've ever done.  If you go back to the early days of this blog, you can read all about our crazy adventures there. 

I truly believe it made us who we are and it was an essential part of gearing up for what was to come.

I DID meet amazing life-long friends and some of the first(and only) people who "get it"--as in the whole situation surrounding the married-to-a-doctor life, plus the lived-in-a-foreign-country AND the knew-them-"before"-it-all thing.

Fifth--The USMLE....I'm sure I missed two of these tests in the debacle above because Zach was onto writing his third by this point, ooops. The first two USMLE's (United States Medical Licensing Exams)  are 8 hours each....that's 8 straight hours of standardized test taking people. And the third one?? Well, that one was a whopping 16 hour test split into two consecutive days!

Stress much??

It has to be said (and I must brag on my husband a bit) he NAILED these tests. I mean KILLED them, as in he wowed people during the whole residency interview process with his fabulous scores! Made the whole months and months(and months and months....) of studying worth while!

And with Zach being a foreign grad, these test scores are an even bigger deal. 

He's a fish going against the current while trying to get a residency position (k, I made that sound really dramatic...but it kinda is.) 

Sixth-- The whole applying for a residency position. This was intermingled with step 6. So every place you actually get an interview at, you have to travel to. As in, fly, drive, etc. 

This part sucks the mulah right out of you. We drove to all the places with in a 8 hour radius, and Zach flew alone to the others. So there is the whole hotel fee, car rental if said hotel did not have a shuttle to the hospital and food, etc while gone. 

FUN.

Thank the Lord, Zach didn't have to fly to too many places. 

You apply to these positions in September and the whole interview process can span into February. Then there's the "Match"....I'm not even going to try and explain, give the details to the process of how they end up placing you in your Residency position...because quite frankly, I'm still a bit lost by the whole process!

The "Match" happens in January for Urology, and all other Medicine/Surgery/etc have the "Match" in March. 

You basically get an email at 9am on the day of and it tells you where to go....and then you cry A LOT and thank the Lord that you matched and have a placement...and a job for the next 5 plus years.

Zach matched in Urology (his DREAM job!!) and he didn't have the agonizing wait until March.

Seventh--there's residency(which is what Zach's in now)....when said debt cripples you and you have to live on minimal amounts of money and time with said doctor. 

The lack of money is one thing, at times it sucks, but we're so used to it now that it's not that big a deal most of the time.

It's the TIME people, the lack of time with a loved one because they work 90+ hours A WEEK and the rest is spent sleeping or reading papers/research/etc to keep up with their particular specialty(in Zach's case, Urology). It gets old, really old...and we're not even 6 months into residency. Awesome.

And don't get me started on a month straight of night shifts....

It's a long road before any real money is made and you feel as though you are swimming in a sea of debt.

Basically, it's a lot of long hours, missing big "moments" in life, an always exhausted husband, crazy debt....the list goes on. Essentially, this makes me kind of a single parent for a good portion of the time.

All that being said(did I sound like a Debbie Downer or what?!?) it's Zach's passion and he LOVES it!

I can't even begin to say that his excitement for his job everyday (even through all the grogginess) is infectious! God has SO placed him in the right spot and placed me to take this journey right along side him....we started dating his first year of undergrad, I was still in the 12th grade...scandalous ;)

We know this is where he is...WE are... supposed to be, but that doesn't stop it from being hard... A LOT of the time.

I look back on all he's gone through, we've gone through, and I'm so grateful because like I said before, it's ALL shaped us into the people we are today. 

We trust God so much more than ever before, it's what happens when your life takes a "Where Are We Off To Next" turn every few years. God's just keeping us on our toes ;)

Zach's job comes with crazy responsibilities, dealing with death often and here in the States, there's the lovely possibility of being sued, good times. 

You have to understand, I grew up in a smallish town in Western Canada (both Zach and I did, he lived in the town next to mine) and I never in my WILDEST dreams ever thought that I'd live anywhere else....ever. I thought I'd marry a farmer (seriously) and live out my days in Abbotsford.  

To think that one day I'd be married to a man who was a doctor and living in Georgia, let alone New Jersey and Grenada before that??? Unfathomable. 

God knows so much better than we do what we need. 

The life experience we've gained from living in these places, the friends we've made...I can't imagine that not having happened!

We had a chip on our shoulders when Zach didn't get into Med School in Canada, I'm not going to lie. He had all the right stuff and for some reason didn't get in...

But now we GET it, this way was SO much better, harder, but better! 

God knew the reason and boy was he right.

You Know You're In Grenada When

Well...I just finished studying for my Pathology exam tomorrow and I figured this was a good time to make my blog debut before I get into Microbiology studying. Since the blog is The Adventures of Zach and Jen, I figured Zach should make a post. Yes, this is Zach, not Jen... and I just referred to myself in third person. While we've been in Grenada we've noticed a few things are different in comparison to home...you've all seen those emails titled "You know you're from Saskatchewan when..." or "You know you're a Menno when..." Let me introduce the "Top 10 You Know You're in Grenada When...":

10. It's "cooling off a bit" when the temperature hits 35C

9. The price of a shot of rum at home is the same as the whole bottle

8. The food court at the local mall is a top 3 choice for places to eat on date night.

7. You are routinely chased by the police station's pet goat on your daily run...

6. One day you decide to fight back, you turn around and chase the same goat...screaming

5. You go into the grocery store on March 25th and realize an expiry date of March 17th is "not bad"

4. The teller at that same grocery store looks like she has "bitter beer face" when you put your groceries on the conveyer belt

3. You don't need a lawnmower when the neighborhood cow is hungry

2. The punishment for wearing camouflage is the same as being in possession of porn

1. A police officer in his cruiser is knockin' back a cold Carib beer

Ladies and Gentlemen...We have reached a new level...

Wow, it has been a while since I last wrote. Funny how not much can happen in your life, but you still are too busy to do simple little things like update a blog. Or maybe it is because not much is going on in my life that I haven't written, I'm going to go with that one, better than just sounding plain old lazy.
Well, Zach is now in ultimate over drive. I always wonder how he could possibly get any busier, and then he does. He has just been given a paper to write by Monday (which will be published) and that means researching it and writing it in that time. This is on top of all his other studying, not to mention the fact that he has convinced himself that he has been afflicted with Meningitis...don't ask. Apparently this is something that happens to people who are on the road to becoming doctors, they read about a disease/virus/ailment and think that they have contracted it. The ultimate in hypochondriacism. He has coined a new term for this, MSH, which stands for Medical Student Hypochondriacism. He has also started to diagnose others (he's sharing the love) and apparently I have a mild case of passive-aggressive disorder (don't know how to take that, but to tell you the truth...I think he is right). He might as well be a doctor already for all the diagnosing he is doing. It doesn't help that every time he talks to one of his friends back home they tell him their problems (real or not) and ask him, calling him doctor of course, to tell them what is wrong with them. He usually tells them something made up to satisfy them and get a laugh.
So this crazy weekend is progressing at break-neck speed and Zach has, of course, deemed certain things unnecessary, namely sleep. He got to bed, I repeat GOT to bed, at 7 this morning, proceeded to have one and a half hours of sleep and woke up to continue writing. This is what I have to deal with, crazy med student and all his baggage. And you all think that it is fun and games in Grenada, well I'm here to tell you that it is not!

I'm baaaaaaack!

Well, it has been a while since I have updated, so a lot has happened. I'm back in Grenada and have been since the 31st of January. It was great to see Zach again and I think that he felt the same way. Or maybe it was just the fact that he had his cook back...who knows! Anyway, things are back to the same ol' here and to be honest, it feels as though I never left. What a scary thought. I walked into our apartment for the first time and I got this strange feeling like I was home, weird! I never thought that this would feel like home to me, but it is getting there (just in time to leave again for good in four months). I guess I won't really have a sense of home for a long time, another scary thought! I have no clue as to where we will be next year and it is a strange feeling. We might go to England to do some clinical rotations, or we might go straight to New York, or New Jersey, who knows. It is actually a bit of a liberating feeling to have our future so wide open, who knows where God might take us?! Weirdest of all is that I was the BIGGEST fan of staying in Abbotsford (my home town) for the rest of my life. I hated the thought of change and could not picture my life anywhere else. And here I am, thousands of miles from home and contempaleting, with my husband, (why does it still feel so weird to say that?) if we will go to the US or England, just cuz we can! Life never ceases to amaze me. Well, enough philosophical talk for now, back to life here. The best news of all is that I have not seen one cockroach since I've been here! And to think I spent all that money on buying roach traps when I was home?! We are going to set them up anyway, just in case this is some sort of grace period they are giving me. Zach is still working like a maniac, as usual. Wow, he makes it really hard to blog about him, he never does anything out of the ordinary for me to report. I burnt myself at the pool the other day, aparently you can't go out for the first time in six weeks without sunscreen (yes, I know this is bad). Well, I have to get back to another hard day of reading and TV watching!

Baby it's cold outside...oh wait...

I can't believe...it is already December 1st today! For all you people on the West Coast, I'm four hours ahead and therefore it is the 1st already. I (or should I say, we) leave for home in 15 days, that is crazy. As you can imagine it has been really hard to focus on life in Grenada for the past few days. With all the snow back home and knowing that we are leaving in two weeks, it's kinda hard to concentrate. For me anyways. Zach on the other hand is a freaking trooper! He can block just about anything out of his mind while he is in "study-mode". Don't get me wrong, he talks about home whenever his head isn't in the books, but for some reason or other, he can just get down to business when he needs to. I guess that is why he's the one in Med School and I'm the one working on the tan (but really he should work on his tan too. There should be some sort of law that prohibits his degree of white in a Caribbean country!).
This last week has been one filled with events for me. Desperate Housewives on Sunday with the girls (Laura and Kristin), movie night with the girls on Tuesday, Book Club on Wednesday night (with the girls+2), Pool Day Thursday with Laura and the rest of the other S.O.'s (for those of you who don't know this, it stands for the Significant Others...that's me!).......yes, there is a bit of a trend here, there is a lot of girl time, but in my defense, Zach has been having a lot of book time lately:) Anyway, the point of my whole rant is that having so many events planned makes the time go by nicely!
I guess I should give a bit of an update about Zach. Well, he is studying....yeah, that about sums it up! No, just kidding (well, he is studying). He has finished going to all the classes that he needs to and his butt is officially glued to his chair until his exams are over. Only two finals to go and he is done his first year of Med School (Man, where has this year gone?!). Zach has also been cranking out the Christmas tunes to try and get in the holiday spirit. I think that he gets his best studying done when Bing Crosby is singing.
Anyway, tomorrow night is Date Night and I can't help but wonder...will we be going to KFC for dinner or for chicken nuggets at the mall food court...hhmmmm...? Ahhh Grenada, we love you!