All entries for May 2015

The Last Push

Last week was one of the most stressful weeks of my academic life, but I can now say that clinical finals are over!

My exams were on Tuesday afternoon and Thursday afternoon. I had wanted to get them over with as quickly as possible, so of course I ended up in the last possible session! The morning before each exam went so slowly, and I sat in the house trying to relax but watching the clock from waking up at 6am to leaving the house at 12.

Arriving at the hospital before the exams, it was obvious that everyone was nervous. There were sandwiches and cakes for us, but they didn't get touched until afterwards. After a briefing, we were led to a corridor where we all sat outside our individually allocated room. A bell rang, and we entered the room.

From then we had 15 minutes to take a history and examine a patient, which is quite tight on time. The 30 seconds it took for the examiners to introduce themselves and shake my hand seemed to take forever, but the rest of the time flew by. After that another bell went, and we left the room to think for 15 minutes and produce a management plan. Then it's back into the room for 15 minutes of presenting the patient and getting grilled.

Everyone says that these exams are like your driving test, with, “inspection, palpation, percussion, auscultation,” (or lookin’, touchin’, hittin’ and listenin as I remember it), as the equivalent of, “mirror, signal, manoeuvre.” The examiners aren’t expecting a perfect display of skills. They just want to know that you are safe and that you know the limits of your own practice.

Having said that, as lots of people will remember from their driving tests, when under pressure it isn’t always that easy to perform as well as you’d like! After 2 cases, I felt physically and mentally drained. It wasn't like any exam that I've had before. Although I now know that I did enough to pass, at the time I felt like I could only remember about 60% of the stuff that I’d revised.

The thing that was most interesting in the exams was that most of the patients had clinical signs to find. We spend hours as students trying to seek out just such patients, but so many of them are well in the community that the only times they attend hospital are for the occasional clinic and to help out with exams! A lot of us saw some signs for the first time in finals, and it took a lot of effort not to be too enthusiastic and excited about them during the exam!

Over 4 days 170 students saw 4 patients each. That's a lot of patients, and I think it's incredibly kind of these people to give up a whole day of their time to let us talk to them and prod and poke them to show that we will make safe doctors. I imagine that it's almost as tiring for them as it is for us, but they continue to come and help year on year. It's a timely and important reminder of the respect and trust that people have in the medical profession.

Megan Earle : 15 May 2015 13:38 |  Tags: Finals Mbchb Sarah Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

30 days, 720 hours, 43’200 minutes until exams…

Exam fever has turned into exam delirium and I find myself thinking of Dory from Disney’s Finding Nemo singing just keep swimming, just keep swimming as she swims through the dark and dangerous waters. Over the next 30 days I need to just keep revising as I pass through the murky and unfathomable waters of blocks 1 to 4 and grapple with new challenges presented by Block 5! It’s hard to maintain confidence in your own way of working when you find yourself comparing yourself to your fellow students some of whom seem to have no need to eat or sleep and seem to be able to reel off endless lists that you had forgotten even existed. I’ve always worked quite steadily, I try and make sure I don’t work too late and always make time for dinner that doesn’t just consist of cereal. Although I haven’t been very good at keeping up many extra activities outside of medicine this year I have started walking the 3 miles to the medical school a few times a week, making sure I have some fresh air which I think has really helped. Even during my PhD I didn’t let myself get too worked up over what other people were doing but I’m struggling to do the same in my first year of medicine. The amount of information is so mind boggling that most people have had to change their working style and mine has morphed and improved over the year, but have I done enough? I hope so, but I won’t know for sure until the end of June!

Apart from exam stress I have just finished my second week of block 5 Reproduction and Child health. We are covering some very interesting topics such as child development, conception and labour and because the block leads know we are revising at the same time they are doing everything they can to help us. Providing quizzes to help us consolidate our knowledge and providing quick recap sessions in response to questions sent in has been really helpful. The lecturers at the medical school really do go out of their way to help you if they can. A great example of this was a whole afternoon of revision on some of the trickier concepts from Block 1 and 2 which was run solely in response to requests from students. Peer support is now running two sessions a week and extra sessions on specific topics at the weekend. Ruder and more memorable mnemonics for various topics are passed around the cohort, and while I’ve never been so stressed in all my life the amount of help from the medical school and my fellow students is really encouraging.

I can’t just work constantly though and after a particularly long day this week I made my first trip to the SU bar the Dirty Duck on main campus with a few other medics who had had enough for the day. Chilling in the sunshine with a cold drink and new friends made me realise that we are all in the same boat and we just have to keep revising… only 43’200 minutes to go!

Megan Earle : 13 May 2015 09:36 |  Tags: Exams Joanne Mbchb Warwick |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem