Tense about NFL draft day? Your NCAA basketball tournament bracket? Piffle! A walk in the park.

For sheer, gut-churning anxiety, nothing quite compares to the annual Match Day luncheon at the University of Colorado Health Science Center's School of Medicine.

More than 100 fourth-year graduating medical students attended the luncheon Thursday at El Jebel Oasis Restaurant in Denver, where they listened to speeches for about 30 minutes while nervously eyeing a table covered with envelopes at the opposite end of the room.

The envelopes contained letters detailing which hospital each student would be matched with and where they spend the next three to five years as resident physicians. Each had his or her own nerve-racking tale.

Lucky break for pair

Bree Parker and her fiance, Mark Willis, are getting married June 3 in Hawaii, where his family lives. She is studying family medicine. He wants to be an ear, nose and throat specialist.

"To match as a couple is very difficult," Parker said. "It's hard enough to match as an individual. We were applying all over the country in 12 different states. It was very difficult and expensive.

"Everybody runs up and gets their envelope. We got ours and got back to our table where our family was sitting. We just ripped them open and were very excited by what we saw.

"Our first choice" - Utah.

"We were happy but not expecting it."

At another table, tension was mounting for Cristina Wood and her mother, Linda Sollars. Wood is a single mom. Her mother helped raised Wood's 2-year-old son, Ethan, while she finished her schooling.

At the luncheon, Ethan looked puzzled at all the commotion as the two women dissolved into tears.

"Oh my gosh, it was unnerving. I had no idea, the tension was unlike anything I'd ever seen in the corporate world," Sollars said. "I'd had flowers for my daughter, but I had to go back outside for a moment. It was just a wall of tension, of nervous excitement.

"When the students go up to the table, the room went into this complete hushed silence, and then there's this little burst and a shout here and there as each student opens the envelope."

'I'm too nervous'

Wood hesitated opening her envelope.

"I'm trying to get to the back table, but I've got to get through all these people. I finally got to my envelope, and I'm too nervous to open it. So I walked back to my table where my mom and my son were sitting.

"I sat down and I said, 'Mom, if I don't get a position in Colorado, you know I'm going to have to leave.' "

Sollars responded, "I will go and help you."

"She opened the envelope. I couldn't tell from her face. She started crying, and I started crying. I said, 'Are you OK?' and she said, 'I did it! I did it!' "

Wood had gotten both her first choices, a year at St. Joseph Hospital followed by three years of anesthesiology at University Hospital.

"Eight years (work), and everything comes down to this," Wood said. "It's a long road for all of us, but it's incredible to get what you're most passionate about."

ensslinj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5291