surgery clinicals today, hopefully i'm a clear pass!
couldn't have asked for nicer examiners (well, except one).
tired, more to come but thanks a million for all the good wishes!!!! :D
final clinicals on sat and sun. 4 more days!
week 2 is down, we've trolled our way through another 3 horrifying papers plus a communications skills OSCE of 10 stations worth.
medicine essays were alright for me, but mcqs were again another horror. this time, i fell asleep despite during the paper despite drinking coffee in the middle of it and 3 toilet breaks to wash my face :\
plus i'm pretty sure i got a lot of questions wrong so that was even more :(
eg: young girl who is febrile, signs of SLE, renal punch +. what is your first step in mx?
others: RESUS
me: give iv ABx. :( OMG! :(
but at least i made one lucky guess - entacapone turns your urine ORANGE :D
go me, i am the queen of ridiculous answers.
modified essays were a HORROR. it's an evolving scenario but you just can't be sure of what they're asking for.
plus the questions were really really BAD.
eg: using a bone marrow aspirate to diagnose TB
eg: managing a patient with status epilepticus complicated by anaphylactic shock to phenytoin
eg: reaching a diagnosis of an elderly man who has just travelled overseas to a rural place infamous for having CSWs (commercial sex workers) with his family, and is now feeling malaise and has a fever, and you get ONE investigation. lovely.
and you know the best thing? our "lovely" prof even commented on someone's facebook note: i think all the papers to date have been fair.
FAIR???? far from fair if you ask me. give ANY ONE, including profs some of the questions we had and see how they do before you tell me it's fair.
osces was like a game, i zoomed in and out of stations and talked alot of rubbish, thankfully mock patients were nice. my hands shook so badly when i was suturing that the examiner laughed at me!
and i've never removed staples before so my prof even showed me how to do it in the middle of the station whilst saying:"girlie, it's obvious you've never done this before yah."
to which my meek reply was: " err, not really prof". duh.
at least osces was alot better!
clinicals are coming up - rumours abound about weird cases aplenty eg. von Hippel Lindau syndrome, charcot marie tooth (HSMN1), osteogenesis imperfecta etc.
i have no clue what to expect, but hopefully i'll recover from this beating by the medicine theory papers to face the clinicals with my head held high!
day 3 of exams has ended, and i'm exhausted. i've averaged 4 hours of sleep a night (my usual is 7! AHHHHH). my skin is sallow and my eye bags are HUGE. a friend who doesn't study with me had a big shock on seeing me today in the exam hall and said i looked terrible.
i then got a further shock on looking at myself in the mirror. OH MY GOODNESS :(
the things stress does to you - i forgot to eat breakfast before my exam today! :\ thankfully i was saved from hypoglycaemia by the sweets i sneaked into my pencilcase throughout the 3 hours. gracious.
exams so far have only been surgical theory papers, but oh my goodness they seem to be going from bad to worse.
doing 180 multiple choice questions with tricky tricky wordings and double negatives made my head spin. people tossed coins, fell asleep during the paper, and headed for plentiful toilet breaks. MY GOODNESS.
and me? i had diarrhoea through all my papers. WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME????
thank goodness i sit in front of the toilet in the exam hall!!!!
2 more weeks!
2 days to doomsday!
sorry for lack of updates, been sitting in school attempting to squash stuff into puny little brain (seems to have gotten smaller, much).
lots of discussion going around school - realised that if i had gone to states instead i would have had an easier time facing boards rather than being at the mercy of examiner's questions and unfair distribution of cases etc etc but that is another story for another time. first to pass my MBBS and then i'll talk about USMLE and heading to states to train!
2 days to go, 2 days to go. brain is shrinking by the day, tiredness is increasing exponentially. many of us are all bemoaning this, and wondering how we will ever pass with our current little knowledge (of course, typical med school "snipers" kick in - lots of moaning and groaning and wailing about being stupid and daft, and then owning all our arses with their immense knowledge and making the rest of us feel like dirt - i have plenty of friends like that. HMPH).
but i am also going to miss this last round of studying together, we will never do such things again and have such great company! :(
