Whew! What a year 2024 was. I truly cannot believe how much can change in a year, not to mention how much you can learn about yourself! Today is January 3rd and I am just now getting to look back at the previous year and do some reflecting. My birthday is December 31st so not only did I ring in a new calendar year, I celebrated turning 27! So, I am going to recap my year in this post for you guys. Let’s get into it!
January
January was a great month! I spent it in Barnwell, SC working on my pediatrics rotation. Peds is the specialty I wanted to go into all along and this was my first real experience in it and I loved it. I was so blessed to stay with my friend Alyssa and her family in her childhood home during that rotation as well. My preceptor was absolutely fantastic and I learned a TON from him. We even had one boat day in Charleston because it was so warm!
February
Whew…. February. What can I say about her? This month was arguably the wildest month of 2024 for a lot of reasons. The first of which is that this was my mental health rotation month, so that in itself was ~interesting~ to say the least. The facility I worked at was essentially student run and the supervision was dismal. The facility is an old hotel that patients now live in. This is located in South Florida so regardless of the fact that it was technically winter, it was MUSTY in there! My school sent us to Florida despite the fact that Palm Beach County is insanely expensive, so my friend Alyssa and I rented a 1 bedroom apartment during this rotation. We paid $4000 to share a king size bed with both of our 90+ pound dogs 🙂 Anyway, we did have some fun though. We spent our Wednesdays and weekend nights at Renegade’s line dancing our little hearts out!
March
March was my general surgery rotation! If you can’t tell, in PA school the months are measured by specialties because it is all consuming 🙂 This rotation was one of my favorites because my preceptors were AWESOME. We were always cutting up laughing and jamming out in the OR. This rotation also really solidified my knowledge in GI which is never a bad thing! I really got my study plan for EOR exams down in the beginning of 2024 which I can share in another post. I also got to go to New Orleans, LA for yet another Miss Louisiana USA pageant! The pageants are always so fun and this one was no different.
April
April was an interesting month for me. This was a month FULL of highs and lows. So, I’ll start with some lows and end it on the highs. A low was that I had to sell my Jeep. If you know me, you know that Jada the Jeep was my dream car and I loved her so much. She was paid for and up to this point had been relatively inexpensive to own. Until everything broke at once… So I had to sell her and get something more reliable. Another low is that I got put on professional probation at school. I typically would never admit such a shortcoming publicly, but in the spirit of transparency, sometimes we make mistakes and it is okay to acknowledge them and learn from them. But it was a really challenging time for me because it left me feeling so inadequate and incapable to do the job I was in school for. At the end of the day, it was a learning opportunity that now has zero effect on my life. Now for the highs! In April I was lucky enough to purchase a brand new vehicle for myself! This was a first and a really cool milestone to hit, especially in PA school. I was able to do this because I sold my Jeep and used that money for the down payment and I got a job at Texas Roadhouse to cover the payments. I can do a post about how I worked in PA school also. Another high was that my internal medicine rotation was wonderful and this rotation inadvertently led me to my job that I currently have! More on that later.
May/June
May was my Emergency Medicine rotation. This was one that I thought I was going to love but I truly, absolutely, did not. I think it is just so different as a provider than it is as a patient care tech. I also think I was tired of living in my camper in the middle of summer and running all over the highways of SC. Between the rotation, the last pageants, job interviews, and working at Texas Roadhouse every weekend, I was just truly worn out. I barely studied for this exam at all and I did the best on it. So I honestly don’t know if that was because I had studied the same material so many times or if I learned more than I thought on the rotation.
June/July
This was my last rotation of PA school!!! I chose to do another pediatric rotation in a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) since I knew I was going to be working in one (I just didn’t know which yet!) Which leads me to the highest high!! I was offered my DREAM job in July!! I accepted a pediatrics job in an FQHC in the upstate of South Carolina, which is exactly what I wanted and hoped for. So I feel SO SO SO blessed to have that! It was also my last day of school EVER which was fantastic. July is when life really started to get good after the mess that was the first half of the year. I was still working like crazy at Texas Roadhouse but also began studying for the PANCE!
August
August was a decent month! I officially graduated from PA school and my family got to see me become the first on both sides to receive a Master’s degree, something I am proud of myself for. It felt like such a relief more that anything to be free from my program. They really put me through hell but I am certainly stronger for it. The rest of the month was spent working at Roadhouse and studying for nearly 16 hours per day for the PANCE. I truly was a bit manic by the end but sometimes it be like that, ya know?
September
September was a beautiful and gorgeous month!! As soon as I took the PANCE on August 30th, I left for a week long vacation with my family in Destin, Florida. It was MUCH needed and incredibly relaxing! Until the day before the results of the PANCE came out at least. Then I started to freak out but it worked out because I got to open my results that I passed (yay!!) with all of my most loved people surrounding me. It was such a beautiful moment filled with happy tears and relief. The week we got back from the trip, I closed on my first home!! So it was actually a whirlwind. I started getting my house set up and it was so fun to plan what all I’d like to do with this place. The plans were halted by Hurricane Helene, which luckily didn’t do much damage to my house thank the Lord!
October
October was so wholesome!! We started the month by doing a family trip to Gatlinburg, TN and went to Dollywood! It was so much fun because we had my all of dad’s side of the family in one cabin with 10 kids 10 and under. It was seriously such a blast. We took 4 generations of our family on a trip together! Then, I started my new job as a pediatric PA. AND LET ME JUST TELL YA, that first paycheck was INCREDIBLE. I went on a shopping spree, I am not even joking. My card got flagged for fraud because I went so hard, but ya know what? Treat yourself sometimes.
November
In November, I started settling into my job and seeing patients on my own. It was nice to get started and take the training wheels off but still a little scary. I started by seeing 1 patient per hour for a maximum of 8 per day. This was a really nice way to make sure I was doing the right things and it gave me time to get acquainted with the other members of my care team! We also had girl’s weekend in Clemson, as we do each year. It was nothing short of an amazing time. My friend Taylor stayed at my house in November because she had a rotation for CRNA school at the hospital in my town, so it was a fun little sleepover almost every night!
December
December was another wonderful month full of family and friends. I feel like I was doing something festive nearly every day of the month, certainly every weekend! I even got to host my family for Christmas this year in my new house. This was a goal of mine that I set at the beginning of the year, thinking it would be in my parents’ home in TN, but luckily, it was at mine! This year was truly a wild, wild ride. But as you can see, sometimes we have to go through the rain to appreciate the rainbows. Here’s to 2025!
