Last Day of Fall Semester

Yesterday I took the Comprehensive Basic Science Exam (CBSE). This is an exam covering the first two years of medical school that is put out by the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME). They're the same people who write and administer the medical boards. There were four sections (Step 1 has seven sections), each with fifty questions, and we had a total of four hours to complete the exam. The questions cover everything from first and second year, with a heavier emphasis on second year subjects like pathology and pharm. Suffice it to say that the test was really hard, especially since we haven't covered half the material yet! I would say in each section there were about 25% questions that I knew, 50% of questions where I could eliminate the answers down to two or three choices, and 25% where I had absolutely no clue whatsoever. The good part is that I had no trouble finishing in time. In fact, I went through the entire test three times and was still finished 45 minutes early.

It's unbelievable how fast the time has gone by. I'm now officially halfway through my second year of medical school. We finished the diabetes PBL case, and we had two seminars today, one on hypoglycemia and one on the complications of diabetes. They were both pretty good. The first seminar leader asked me to pretend to have hypoglycemia, so I was shaking, sweating, having a headache, and then I "fainted." After we talked about the symptoms of hypoglycemia, she gave me a little bag of Skittles. I guess that is supposed to be a glucose source to take care of my "hypoglycemia." The second seminar leader is the same endocrinologist that I had endocrine clinic with last week. It was funny, because he remembered me, but he clearly didn't remember my name and he didn't want to have to ask me what it was again.

In the afternoon, I did some errands and went to the gym. I don't normally go to the gym on Fridays, but they are closing all weekend for Christmas, so I can't go tomorrow like I usually do. Then I wrote evals for my PBL group and cleaned the lounge refrigerator and microwave. We have a signup sheet to clean out the fridge every couple of weeks, so that wasn't too bad. But the micro was absolutely disgusting. I don't know when it was cleaned last, but it probably was years ago.

Grades for my MS classes came out today from Case: two As in epidemiology and clinical trials, and a B in biostatistics. I was expecting the clinical trials and stats grades, but the A in epi came as a pleasant surprise. Looking back over the past year, I realize that although having to do the extra work for the MS was miserable sometimes, overall I'm glad that I stuck it out. It's one of those things that isn't always fun while you're going through it, but the short-term pain is worth the long-term gain. I guess that is true of medical school in general.

We have SAQs and CAPPs to do over break like normal. I am planning to do them this weekend and get them over with by Monday morning at the latest. I also have clinical homework to do for my first week back in January, which involves preparing patient presentations for my FCM group and my clinical reasoning group. The clinical reasoning class is something new, and we are doing that instead of longitudinal clinic the first week. I just realized that I will be doing BOTH presentations on Tuesday of my first week back. Well, at least I'll get it all over with early. It looks like we go back to clinic as usual after that first week.

I want to wish all of my blog readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'll see you all next year. :-)