It’s that time of a year again to look back. This will probably be a shorter post than I might want to write, but that is in part because of the good things that did happen this year.

First a link back to my preview I wrote on the first of this year.

• I had said I was going to keep writing for Red-Gate. Turns out, that didn’t happen. Too many other things were going on to really write any articles. I did keep my Friends of Red-Gate status and helped talk my largest client into adopting many of their tools.
• I talked about premiering a new NCRC class called “Tip of the Spear” (TOTS) for medical folks. Again, this didn’t happen and probably won’t for 2023, but the team and I are making progress and I hope to make more this week on developing the curriculum.
• Continue Blogging: this I definitely did. I may have missed a Tuesday or two, but I also had some extra posts, so I think I probably hit 52 in the year anyway.
• Travel: Other than 2 trips to Washington DC to see friends, nothing really happened here.
• Biking: I had hoped to break 700 miles again this year. I’m 38 miles short. And ironically most of that is because I was 33 miles short of my goal in September. That said, I did buy a new bicycle, so I’m excited about that.
• Hiking: definitely didn’t happen.
• Caving: I did get in a few new caves thanks to the Week-Long cave rescue class in Clifton Forge, Virginia, but I didn’t get into any new ones locally. I’ll call that a win.

So on one hand, it may sound like I didn’t manage to reach a majority of my goals, but the reality is, it’s been a very successful year. As noted in the post at the start of the year, my primary goal was preparing to apply for PA School. I had given some initial thought to completely all my requirements so I could apply sometimes in the 3rd quarter of the year for entry in January of 2023 for completion in 2025. After some thought, I realized that just wasn’t practical, so I reset my goals a bit. My plan is to apply to several in 2023 for entry in 2024 and completion in 2026. It’s a far more realistic goal.

So, in January I started with 3 classes a the local community college:

• A&P I – one of my favorites. I love learning how the human body works
• General Psychology – an interesting class and the professor was good, but psych isn’t my future
• Biology I – two different professors, one for lecture, one for lab.

I’m proud to say that I got As in all of them. I felt like I was off to a good start. My undergrad grades weren’t great, so I need some wins here.

Over the summer I took an accelerated version of Organic Chemistry that I wrote about several times. I had hoped to eek out at least a C, given the horror stories I heard while at RPI. And honestly, in some ways it was one of the hardest classes academically I’ve ever taken. But, the professor was great and I learned a lot and managed to get an A.

For the fall I slowed down a bit and only look A&P II and Biology II. The tread of keeping my 4.0 continued. It does help that both classes sort of build on each other.

But the biggest change, and consumer of time was finally getting a position as an Emergency Department Technician. For the primary school I plan on applying to, I need at least 1000 hours of “patient contact time”. I had delayed applying long enough that I was starting to get nervous I might not get a good enough job in time. But, as they say, fortune favors the bold, and I got fortunate here. The first seven weeks were spent in orientation. Since then I’m a full-fledged “Blue Badge” tech and I’m working on getting my “Red Badge” so I can be a lead tech on Level 1 and 2 traumas. I’ll write about that more in the future.

One advantage of being out of orientation is I can pick up extra hours (at a higher rate which is nice). And so, after just over 2 months of effort, I’m at over 30% (i.e. over 300 hours) of the way towards my goal of 1000 hours. I fully expect to far exceed that 1000 hour metric long before the application deadline. And in fact, will be 1.2% closer by midnight tonight. And that’s why I can’t a better blog today. Time to jump in the shower and head to work. This will be my 2nd of 3 12 hours shifts in a row (my schedule for now is a 12 hour shift every Friday and then every other weekend (giving me 24 hours a week). But I also picked up a bunch of work earlier this week so I’m well over 40 for the week. Right now, I’m getting hours when I can. And so with that, I’m off.