Post-exams

All done! The second OSCE day was more fun than the first as we pretty much knew what was coming up and had some time to prepare. It involved taking a 'funny turn' history, giving advice about heart failure drugs, trying to get a diabetic patient to comply with medication and sort out his personal issues, the standard resp and abdo exams, a lower limb PNS, and a really cool emergency situation station where you have to assess the patient (the whole ABCD shabang), give oxygen and put a drip up. The last exam of the week (and year) was what everyone was dreading, data interp, with no-one having any real ideas of  what was going to come up. In the end it was quite straightforward., standard diagnoses and treatment with tricky questions here or there, pictures of tumours we were supposed to identify and some random ECG strips that weren't the usual heart-block picture. I think I passed all of them inshaallah :)

Anyway, post-exam time has already been eventful; straight after the exam/prayer, we went to eat, where a friend quite valiantly accepted the 'eat 6 extremely hot chicken wings within 20 minutes and get a free meal' challenge. The problem is that we weren't aware that you couldn't have any water during the challenge, and so 2 wings later, he had to give up, poor guy. The video probably won't make it into the public domain anytime soon. Saturday I had to wake up early to be a participant in laparoscopy research, where they are trying to compare 2D and 3D laparoscopy. So I basically stood there for 3 hours wearing 3D glasses, trying to transfer rubber prisms from various pegs within 48 seconds (impossible). I've done 40 attempts, another 40 to go before I move onto the next task. I find it quite fun, and it's definitely stimulating the hand-eye coordination bit of my brain! After that I had to rush off to North London to help out with a 'getting into medicine' thing that the BMA were attending, and in the evening I waited around for my friends to finish watching spiderman so I could bid farewell to one who was going abroad the next day.

Sunday was when I was supposed to meet another friend to say goodbye, for which I turned down VIP access to the British Grand Prix (I know!), and it didn't even happen in the end! So instead I watched Andy Murray attempt to be the first Wimbledon champion in 70 or so years, and we had to miss the end of it to get to our last Quran lesson before our teacher goes away for Ramadan. And now currently I am sitting here in my uni library, after having a meeting with a professor (surgeon who I've been on a couple of post-night on-call ward rounds with) who wants us to collect data for neurogastroenterology research and put it into a database. The location of this data is all around the country and abroad, which could mean expenses-paid trips around Europe! I do vaguely remember replying to an email asking for help with research a few months ago, but this came out of nowhere, so inshaallah this all works out! And then a friend came out of nowhere asking to be a participant in a nausea trial, for which I've been thinking about it for a while; getting paid to feel sick is a bit iffy in my books, but I watched the screening film, felt a bit sick, and now I'm waiting to see if I'm eligible to be a participant (but I've already said no to an NG tube being put down me; traumatic past experiences in the clinical skills lab!). And I still feel a bit nauseous typing this, but I think that's about it so far.

I haven't been writing as much on here as I'd have liked to in the past year; with all the things I'm doing and the weekly MMD newsletters I'm typing the spiels for, all my writing energy is sapped by the end of the week. But I have got 'lessons' I've taken away from the year, and I definitely don't want to forget everything that's happened, so welcome back into my life blog! (until October when I resume my newsletter duties)

Mid-exams

Two exams down; the first, a three hour 'single best answer' paper on pretty much everything in general medicine, sat in York Hall (the home of British boxing apparently; can't think of any puns at the moment). The problem with any answer to a question being technically correct, is that you don't really know how well you did afterwards, but it does provide a good opportunity for post-exam debate! But I think I passed inshaallah. The second exam (yesterday) was Day One of OSCE (7 minute stations), so basically seeing actor patients and examining them, taking histories from them, and quite a cool station taking a history through an interpreter! It was extremely nervewracking at the beginning; my first station being a cardio exam, which I did perfectly, apart from washing my hands at the beginning and end, darn! Putting a cannula into a plastic arm was ok, apart from fiddly moment with the sticker wearing my gloves, and just in case there was a mark for building rapport, I asked the plastic arm how its day had been. I didn't get any reply surprisingly. The second day of OSCE is tomorrow, and I hear from people who've already taken it, it's quite a killer, trying to get patients with a host of personal problems to comply with their diabetic medication, emergency situations involving short-of-breath dummies hypothetically vomiting and bleeding everywhere, balanced out by the hopefully-straightforward respiratory and abdominal exams. Then on Friday is the data-interpretation exam, which I have no idea how to revise for, so we'll have to see about that.

Our exam hall, sans the boxing ring.