Adam Lewis’ Resident Graduation and Awards Ceremony, St. Louis

This evening we celebrated Adam. After 5 years of Medical School in Kansas City and 4 years of residency here in St. Louis, he has completed his medical training. He is Dr. Adam Lewis, Ophthalmologist. I still can’t spell that word. “Eye Surgeon” is so much easier.

From my journal:

This event was for the 4 graduating Residents: Adam, Michael from Syria, Matthew from Korea and Vivian from Vietnam. Their visiting parents were all immigrants. The 2nd and 3rd year Residents were also there and the Attendees (teaching professor doctors)–about 10 of them.

We had a nice Mediterranean buffet meal at 7:00, then the program started after we’d eaten. Each Resident was introduced by a faculty Attendant. Adam was introduced by Dr. Cruz, who said if he had one word to describe Adam, it would be “faithful.” Not particularly in a religious way, although Adam is a religious person. He said Adam was faithful to his work, to his patients, to his beliefs and especially to his family, always putting them first. I think Adam was the only one in the room who had a bunch of children. Most are single, one or two were newly married. We got to meet all the other residents. They’ve become close friends through these last 4 years. And we learned more as each was introduced by the faculty member of their choice.

After the introductions of the Residents, some special awards were given. The first was for research. The second was for patient relations (Adam was awarded that last year as a 3rd year). The last award was for the Outstanding Resident: Adam Lewis. We were Very Proud. Wow. Adam has done so well. We quickly saw when we arrived that everyone in the room loved Adam. He’s just such a good guy. Everyone thanked us for raising such a good son. After the awards, they had a slide show of photos of each of the residents, Adam first. He’d asked me for photos from his life several weeks ago, and those were added to with pics of his 4 years here. It was so fun for the others to see other parts of his life.

After that, the evening was over. We stayed for photos and visiting and well-wishing. It was such a fun evening. I really enjoyed Clark watching how everyone treated Adam. And his face was in the slide show several times. I think he felt pretty important and grown up. He was the only kid there (the little ones weren’t invited). We had a really wonderful evening meeting Adam’s world.