Annd score!!

Yes. Its been twenty one days since that fateful day in October.
Had been waiting anxiously for my score sice the past two weeks, and it arrived fifteen minutes before the scheduled time.

I got that elusive 99.

Happiness.

Yay! Yay!

The past three weeks have been hell emotionally.

I've cried over wrong answers.

Brooded over the difficuilt questions.

Rationalised some ethics questions.

Decided on alternate career options.

And what not!*

I wish the NBME people would post the scores earlier. Whoever heard of the scores of an online exam delayed by atleast three weeks. (Even the state Pre-PG exams results are faster!- However crappy the quality of questions might be! :p) But seriously, some of the questions were maddening. Have never come across such questions, ever!

And even more frustrating was that I remembered a lot of them post-exam!

And now after the results, I feel I could've done a tad better had I not taken the exam as the 'most-important-exam-of-my-life'.

The exam period was spent in extremes. At one hand I was anxious during the early blocks. Lost confidence in the middle. And became complacent in the end-- just wanted to get over with it.

Anyway,

All that is past now.

With a good score, I can hapily leave Step1 behind and move on.

Bring on the next step!!

*All my apologies to Papa, Ritz, D, Kau, Navy, Avi, AnkC, Dibs and others who have had to deal with my depressed mood the past three weeks. I still blame the NBME for the tough test!

PTSD

The exam I'd been dreading the past few months is over!

Yes. Done with it.

And now I'm scared shit about the results.

So we won't talk about that anymore.

As for my life, well, I've been just relaxing since the past few days. Of course, its difficuilt to have too much fun when all of your friends are studying for one exam or the other. So its been mostly me, watching a lot of movies and just surfing the net. Haven't even started on the TV binge yet.

Which reminds me, why is it that when you have an exam coming up, you make lists of all these wonderful things you'll do once it is over, but as soon as, the beast has passed, you just lose interest!

Before the exam, I had to restrain myself from spending hours reading blogs and articles, but post-exam... ehh...nothing! (In fact today is the first time I returned to even my blog, after four full days of doing nothing. So have a lot of catching up to do here.. esp in terms of reading.)

I had this whole list of things I wanted to watch/read/do planned out, but ...nah..not anymore!

So maybe the things-to-do-post-exam are actually just defence mechanisms to distract me from the scary reality of the upcoming exam and loads of syllabus.

And another thing that I've noticed is that medical students are born to take exams.

We are programmed this way.

We crib, and we crib... starting months before the exam, but the when on the other side, there this feeling of actually being 'too free'. Every now and then I get this jolt in my tummy, reminding me that I've got to study.. and when I realise the fact that no, I really don't have to study at this point of time, I get a weird sense of apprehensiveness over the sheer unnaturality (if that's actually a word!) of the situation.

Ah well, I guess that's what Medicine is all about.

PS: Writing this post, has brought back those shivers over the thoughts of all the questions I got wrong. Sigh. *Do not in any way ask/tell/talk/mention my past exam. You are welcome to talk about yours*

PPS: Apparently I am incapable of writing about anything besides padhai (and cribbing about it!) these days. I'd started off with something else in mind (writing some sort of list maybe), but landed up ranting about the exam. Oh well.

Enough about me.

How have you been the past two months?

Cheers!

Arps