I started at BYU about two weeks after high school graduation, majoring in Neuroscience. After a year of college I went to Munich on a mission and decided to add a minor in German upon returning home in 2002. During my sophomore year of college I got to know Callie Haggard, originally from Mapleton, who was in her second year of law school at BYU. We froze through a couple of cold November BYU football games and talked all the way through some long movies like Seven Years in Tibet and The Birds before becoming inseparable until our engagement in April of 2004. I left BYU for a research fellowship at the Mayo Clinic that summer while Callie stayed in Utah, worked grueling hours at a big SLC law firm, and planned our wedding, which took place in August of 2004.
In the fall of 2005 I started medical school at the University of Texas in Dallas and Callie sat for the Texas bar. I survived Gross Anatomy and all the other joys of the two preclinical years, and we welcomed our baby girl, Zoe, in May, 2007, the month before I took my boards.
I spent a lot of sleepless, stress-out nights with a flashlight in my mouth and a baby and a book in my lap during that month, but things always have had a way of working out it seems. That pattern held true during the clinical years, where I often spent every third night working 36-hour shifts in Dallas' huge county hospital, Parkland Memorial.
Meanwhile, Callie started the legal department of a non-profit agency in Dallas, specializing in helping abused, immigrant women and victims of human trafficking (modern slavery). She has the remarkable ability to balance motherhood and lawyerhood, constantly surprising me by teaching barely-two-year-old Zoe to count to nine (what happened to ten? I'll never know) and bringing home amazing stories of survivors of human trafficking, whose histories often defy description and always boggle the mind.
I'm finally graduating with an M.D. on June 4, 2009, after which I'll do one year of Internal Medicine residency in Dallas before moving to Miami (hooray for beaches!) for a three-year Dermatology residency, which will consist of treating a lot of skin cancers, seeing patients admitted to the hospital, and a touch of Botox. Zoe, Callie, Minnie (our dog) and I love the beach, and we hope our next baby, due in December, 2009, will like it just as much. Callie says she still loves me despite the fact she will have to take the Florida bar. I'm driving out to Utah for the reunion and look forward to stops including Rocky Mountain National Park, where I've never been, and several places in the Uintahs.
We're all excited to see everyone at the reunion. Please feel free to email to keep in touch: agminer at gmail dot com
4 comments:
Hey! So you're going to Florida? Congratulations! I guess it's a bit warmer than Rochester, though I'm sure the conversation won't be as good.
Also, congrats on the December baby.
Thanks, Joe. I have a good buddy heading up to Rochester. He's planning on looking you up, as I've already told him all about you.
The conversation will neither go so late nor be as good in Florida as it would have been in Rochester. You NYers now have a place to thaw in the dead of winter, though.
Hey Andrew. It was fun reading about your past decade. Let's be sure to talk more at the dinner. I haven't seen you since your reception (which provided the venue for my second date with Anika--thanks). I heard you've been flying to NY to hang with Joe. Actually, I'm very put-out you guys didn't invite me.
Alright, I wasn't going to bring it up, but, yeah, some of us felt like it was rude of you guys to have some sort of awesome east coast sleep over without us. (If Anna was bolding and colorizing comments, I would ask her to put the word "awesome" between two giant, blinking quotation marks.)
Yeah, I've heard your side of the story--residency interview, my foot. I know you spent the night playing "Guess Who?" eating "Good and Plentys," and, if I know the two of you, reading comic books by flashlight before dozing off in your sleeping bags.
(So help me, if Joe has some sort of cool tree fort in his backyard and THAT'S where you slept, I don't even want to know.)
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