Ryan "graduates"!!

So like I said before, Ryan has been doing a 5 year residency at Lehigh Valley Hospital for General Surgery. After the 5 years is up they technically "graduate" and can then start a practice or join one, etc etc. They're officially on their own, with nobody to hold their hand.

Pretty exciting and pretty scary(for the patients haha) if you ask me ;)

Some of Ryan's "classmates are also going on onto Fellowships as well, which is a more specialized area of study and usually for a shorter time than residency. Ryan's Surgical Critical Care Fellowship is only 1 year. Some other classmates are calling this the the end of their schooling and settling down and joining practices.

In honor of this momentous occasion in these doctor's lives, the hospital hosts a Welcome/Graduation Dinner each June. Everyone in the surgery dept. is invited and it serves to welcome the incoming Interns as well as say goodbye to the graduating Chiefs.

 I look forward to this night each June because it's a chance to get dressed up and go mingle with grown ups, and I love it!

Plus, it's held at the Lehigh Country Club, which doesn't hurt either ;)

As a graduating Chief,  Ryan was allowed to "fill a table" so we were lucky enough to have his Parents, Adam and Don, and his Aunt Deb join us for the evening! It was so much fun to share this little bit of our world with them :)

Ryan even won an award for being the best "resident as a teacher" to the medical students. Meaning the students that have done rotations through LVH voted him as their best educator. (oh yes the residents are the ones teaching the med students, while the Attendings are the ones teaching the residents...it's all hierarchy). It was a really nice honor, and he had no idea it was coming! Ryan also gave an amazing speech at the end of the night when the Chiefs were allowed to get up and say their thank you's and goodbyes. 

Each resident was also given a really nice "captain's chair" with the hospitals info and their name on it as a graduation gift (apparently intended to be placed in their offices when they're an attending). The fun part (insert sarcasm here) about this was our stuff had already been shipped to TX, so we had to ship it to our new house. And it cost $165 to do that!!! We used the shipping guy I always ship my photography stuff from and he gave us a hell of a deal because he said anyone else he would have charged $225!! YIKES!!

We were also lucky enough to have Lisa offer to watch Aidan and Mason not only for the dinner, but to keep them overnight as well, which was great, since we got done with the dinner after 10pm. We even stayed out super late with some of the other couples and had a nice night out having drinks and late night appetizers.

 But MAN was I tired after going to bed at 2am. I'm getting too old for this sh*t.

Since our house was completely empty and the contents were already on their way to TX, we all stayed at a local hotel, and it was nice to be all together. We shared a suite with Don and Adam, which was nice because it had a kitchen and a living room. Oh yeah, and a pool. 

The boys LOVED the pool.

Our last night together we ordered in from one of our favorite local pizza places and sat outside on the hotel's patio and ate dinner.

We started chatting with the group at the table next to ours and explained our situation with us moving to TX and all, and as we started to get up after dinner they offered to take a group photo for us before our big adventure the next morning. 

Sometimes people are just plain nice.

So the next morning the adventure began, with Ryan, his Dad, and Adam driving our 2 cars down to TX, while Don, Char, Aunt Deb and the boys and I headed back to NY.

It was a rough go for me knowing that we were driving away from Allentown for good this time, but I managed to keep it together, basically because I was riding in a car with other people. If I had been driving myself I'm sure I would have cried all the way up to Scranton.