Baby Stepping Toward Doctordom

I'm finished! Well, not exactly finished, since my life will henceforth be a never-ending series of standardized exams, but I have just finished taking the USMLE STEP 1 and boy am I glad it is over. These last couple of weeks have been fraught with anxiety, sleepless nights, and a never-ending review of such fun topics like: hairy cell leukoplakia, oligohydramnios, and hypoxanthine-guanine phosoribosyl transferase deficiency. YAY!

Now the waiting begins. I wont receive my score for about 3-4 weeks. So I am forced to marinate in doubt and wonder how I did. If you held a gun to my head I would say I believe I passed; in fact I felt pretty good about the whole ordeal. However experience with the types of questions on this particular exam has shown that, despite being very confident about an answer, you have in fact, gotten it horribly wrong. So we will wait and see with guarded optimism.

To those of you that haven't taken the test yet, I can report that the Kaplan Q-bank questions seemed markedly harder than the actual exam did. Having done just about 2000 questions pretty much guaranteed that no topic was a surprise. So practice (and review) as many questions as you can stand! I felt pretty confident about most of my answers and there was only 2 Whiskey Tango Foxtrot questions. I know that this will not come as a surprise to any of you: I finished the exam fairly quickly. I started at 9am and was done by 2:30. I admit that this is faster than average, but I felt like the questions were not exceptionally long. Although others have said the opposite. So, take it for what it's worth.

I took advantage of 3 breaks and a quick lunch. I did 2 blocks back to back with a 10 min break then another 2 blocks then took a quick lunch . 2 more blocks and, although I felt really good, I forced myself to take a 10 min break to walk around and stay focused. The last block actually seemed like my easiest block. (despite the lack of questions on Single Malt Scotches of the World).

I did force myself to reread some of the questions and caught a few errors where I missed a key word that changed the question,(Left vs. Right etc) so read carefully and you should do fine.

Good luck to everyone who is about to take it.

Rileigh Pictures

For those of you who have been asking for baby pictures...

St. Valentine's Day Massacre

Despite my promises to post regularly, I have once again neglected to post- for almost a month this time. Somehow my life has taken a turn for the surreal; each day morphs into the next without pomp or circumstance. Hours go by in a haze of baby toys, soiled diapers, and medical review books.* The clock winds down toward D-day, Tuesday 19-Feb-2008. This is the day I will take the USMLE Step 1 exam.

Do I feel prepared? In a word, NO. There is so much to remember. I am learning that I have subconsciously omitted a large chunk of my medical school education that I had previously filed in the "Interesting details that I will never need to remember" category. Oh the humanity! Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus and he expects you to be able to differentiate between a bacteria that is gram negative, non lactose fermenting, motile, and produces H2S gas* and a delicious piece of sashimi!

Oh the humanity!

I have become a seething ball of anxiety and cannot wait until Tuesday evening when, for better or worse, the albatross will be finally cast off.

Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock.

* I do manage to keep straight what to change, what to play with, and what to study!

* Salmonella in case you were wondering.