Step III Part I

Today was the beginning of Step III, my last stage of board exams for medical licensing.  It is a two day exam that consists of two eight hour day's worth of multiple guess questions and several computer simulated patient encounters.  I was a little nervous about the exam over the weekend because I have not had much time to study for it being on a ultra crazy month of Plastic Surgery, but it was too late to back out now so I was stuck.  I studied what I could over the weekend and felt somewhat confident with some of the practice questions. 

This morning I took my time getting ready, made sure that I had a good breakfast and set out extra early so I would be able to start on time.  I was getting the pretest jitters and said goodbye to Kelley.  I took off and decided to take a slightly different route to the center cleverly thinking that it would be lighter traffic at peak drive time.  Not so.  I was in heavy traffic for the next 25 minutes when it should have only taken me about fifteen minutes to get there. Apparently the entire working population of Lancaster County travels to Harrisburg via the highway near our house.  Go figure?! For some reason I always ended up in the slow lane.  Somehow I got caught behind this older gentleman in a old pickup with a lawn tractor in the bed that was going 50 in a 65 as the big rigs and other cars are speeding by at 70+  miles and hour. I was about to arrive a little later than I had hoped, until I realized that I was completely on the wrong road for the testing center.  In fact I was several miles away.  I had about 5 minutes to get there so I swerved off the road and typed the address into my iPhone.  It gave me a route that would land me at the testing center three minutes late.  I set off in hot pursuit.  I was making good time until I saw a sign that said "Road Closed." I was ready to give up at this point and I called Kelley telling her how ridiculous this all was.  I was quite nervous not only for the exam, but for whether or not I would get there for them to cancel the exam and send me away with a $200 reschedule fee.  I typed the address in again and it gave me a detour route through a neighborhood and on a back road.  I flew down the road, tires spinning over the wet pavement.  I finally found the correct road and was stuck behind this red truck that was crawling under the speed limit until just before the testing center when it pulled off. I quickly pulled in and parked the car.  There were others waiting at the testing center, but I stepped ahead of them and the proctor called me by name.  "I have been waiting for you all morning."  He said with a stern voice.  Great.  Inside I am screaming, "But I have been trying to get here all MORNING!"  Since the test is eight hours we are what stand between them and going home in the evening.  He correctly assigns me to cubicle number 13 ironically and I go and find the computer and rush to start the exam.  The first question is about panic disorder.  Ya think?!  I felt a little short of breath with my heart pounding until about lunch time.  Just before lunch some people were moving around a bunch and it was terribly distracting because I was right next to the door leading out of the center.  With the distraction I barely finished all the questions.  In the test there were sequential questions that would lock you out of the previous question once you answered it so in the next stem it would give you the answer and ask you another related question.  I missed a handful of these and my confidence was shot.  By the end of the day words started to all blend together and I would have to read each word out loud in my head and concentrate hard on their meanings when a someone would make a noise and then I would have to start the process all over again.  I would read the answer choices and they all started to not be related at all to the question stem.  In the last two hours this Asian kid kept burping.  How distracting?!  It wasn't like a burp once every twenty minutes or a few in a row.  This kid burped every 10 seconds for a string of like a dozen of them.  When the questions started to really blend and I had to read a question stem five times after each burp I almost got up and threw my noise cancelling headphones at him that were beginning to give me a terrible headache. 

The beauty is that I have a whole 'nuther day of it to look forward to.  I hope that someday the NBME and the FSMB will reconsider their choice to have medical students and doctors take exams that determine their eligibility to become a practicing physician and risk their academic careers at the same place that high school dropouts take their GED for the tenth time.  Not that GEDs are bad, the stakes are just a little incomparable.