Fruitless

This is a hard topic to write about. Mostly because after 10 years, we still don't have a job.

About a year ago, I started hounding my husband, asking him over and over when we were supposed to start looking for a job. He talked to a few people in Milwaukee, who all said we should start looking after we start fellowship. So, in August, I started checking radiology job boards 2 or 3 times a day, looking for interventional radiology jobs in areas we would like to live. Pretty much, we want to live in the West...Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Wyoming. We would even consider Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. And if desperate, Nevada and California. We haven't been too interested in being farther east, since we love the mountains and would like to be closer to family.

I even spent about 2 weeks cold-calling radiology groups in those states, asking if they knew about their upcoming radiology needs. Pretty much everyone said they didn't plan to hire.

So I searched the job boards harder. We applied in Hawaii, Arizona, Oregon, and Colorado, and got a few phone interviews. But with no result. They either haven't gotten back with us, or we realized they wouldn't be a good fit.

Paul wants to spend 60-70% of his time doing interventional radiology (IR), which is a completely different beast from general diagnostic radiology. And some of the places he talked with could only promise about 30% IR. Maybe some day he will want to tone his work-load down and do more diagnostic work, but not his first year out of fellowship. These first few years are really the time in which he will hone his IR skills, so he wants to do as much as possible.

Then over Christmas, the perfect job came on the market. Kalispell, Montana. I know that may not sound like heaven to everyone out there, but image living at the base of Glacier National Park. (I was going to insert some pictures of Kalispell, but there were too many good ones to choose from, so google it.)  The town is small, yet because of its remoteness and proximity to Glacier, it surprisingly has lots of amenities. Paul had a great phone interview, 90 minutes long. The job was perfect. Just what he was looking for, twice the vacation time everyone else offers, and more pay than we had expected. We hoped and prayed that no one else wanted to live in paradise.

Two weeks passed, and nothing. Finally we emailed, just to see if they were even still considering him. Gratefully, he is 1 of 5 that they are considering, but they are giving preference to doctors with a little more experience and who have ties to the area. So...we are probably 5th on that list.

To say the least, we have been deflated. To have had the perfect job in our grasp and to lose it. Technically, they might still contact us, but who would ever pass up such a perfect spot?

So now, I continue to trudge through the job boards daily, now applying pretty much anywhere in the country because we are at the point that we just need a stinking job! Even after spending an evening with friends who were telling us all about their great radiology experience with a group in Tulsa that they loved, it was hard to be excited about it, knowing it can never quite match Kalispell in sheer awesomeness.

We have realized that we will likely have to settle for something not-so-awesome. I'm sure we will learn to love any place, like Lubbock and Milwaukee. But now that we finally have a say in where we get to live, I wanted to actually WANT to live there.

At least he has in-person interviews set-up in Tulsa, OK and Richmond, VA...both okay places, but not ideal.

I'm still trying to figure out what I've learned, if anything, from all of this.

I wish we would have started looking 6 months earlier.

I wish we would have contacted groups in cities we were interested in sooner, and 'courted' them a little.

I wish more people needed to hire interventionalists this year.

I wish we had a job.