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.