I could totally get used to this second-year fellow thing. After getting to work at 8:45 AM today, I sat through a few teaching sessions (a “consolidation course” for reinforcing all the clinical knowledge we picked up in the trenches last year), handled a few patient-related issues, and got out of work at the completely reasonable hour of 5:15 PM. It didn’t take long to hop out to our newly-furnished porch, Diet Coke in hand and laptop on my lap, to enjoy a cool Brookline evening — pretty much the diametric opposite of every single evening during my first year of fellowship.

Sure, I have ten on-call blocks coming up this year, fifty or sixty active patients of my own, and will be starting in the research lab in a few weeks, but things look much, much better from this side of the first-year/second-year divide.