Did you time travel?
Did the blog time travel?
Did the internet time travel?
Is time travel even possible?
All important questions, yes (and perhaps not, apparently there was a paper published regarding a theoretical proof against the possibility of time travel). But then how did it get there? Simply put, I was busy. So I actually wrote half of it in August, left it as a draft, and forgot about it until today, when I was brushing my teeth, getting ready to go to sleep.
Yeah, I'm a bit random like that.
Neither my toothbrush, toothpaste, nor bathroom are in any way reminiscent of this blog, medicine, or even an indication of something I've forgotten to do.
So it's the end of my rotations and the end of my first clinical year. Towards the end of my last surgical rotation, it was pretty cruise-y as we were placed in a different hospital, but needed to go to our base hospital for tutorials and such (which happened quite frequently) - and I had multiple meetings for various councils and committees which took up an annoying amount of time. The rotation was general/maxillofacial, but as it was all elective surgery that we had seen at our base hospital, and maxillofacial essentially consisted of pulling out teeth (and only one day a week at that), the surgery itself was rather uninteresting. I may have shot my own foot when I said that surgery was interesting in my last post - yes it is, but only if you're doing it. It's like the game of cricket.
Oops. May have offended a few people there.
Moving on...
So it's come up to exams, and just a month prior we had our third-year OSCEs. The biggest change from OSCEs of previous years was that there were patients with real symptoms and signs... something that shook things up a little! People found that they were running out of time with exams as their polished routine for the examination of a normal person was suddenly routed with the presence of a sign that needed further investigation. Of course, we all encounter that on the wards, but those are usually never timed, and fall in place with a nice, long, detailed 20 minute history. Personally I didn't run out of time, but fudged a few things, which probably reflected in my OSCE mark, which whilst was a pass was hardly anything inspiring. Probably a reason why I've forgotten about this and wanted to focus on studies...
It's much the same this year as the last - a short-answer question (SAQ) paper, an MEQ/SAQ paper, and two multiple choice papers. The content I'd expect would be significantly more clinical in orientation, but I still expect a good amount of pathophysiology and mechanisms, as opposed to definitive treatments. We had a formative exam which wasn't terribly difficult, so I think it should be good, as long as everyone studies. Did I mention that no-one has failed third year yet? No-one in the past two cohorts. So we're really crossing our fingers that our grade isn't the first to sport a third-year casualty. Given that fourth year does not have barrier exams (however I've heard of people failing individual rotations), passing the third-year exams essentially means a ticket to the final fifth year exams.
And then shortly after that, we'd graduate, become interns, and then be responsible for patient lives. Phew.
Back to now - study caps on, and I'll hope to do another post from the other side. To others doing exams or having completed them, good luck and hope your preparation pays off :)
