I’ve got a little list

I was cleaning up my files today and found this:

Things I have learned while studying for the boards:

1. All broken bones are due to child abuse.
2. All black people have sickle cell.
3. All white people have cystic fibrosis.
4. All Native Americans have wacky cholesterol.
5. Ships are made of pure asbestos.
6. Every woman is a carrier for about fifty genetic diseases.
7. Way too many people marry their siblings.
8. Belligerent patients are employing some sort of defense mechanism. They are never just plain jerks.
9. If you have sex, you will get gonorrhea. In your knee.
10. The best way to treat an arrhythmia is to put the patient at risk for another arrhythmia.
11. And if that doesn’t work, just go in with some electrodes and kill off bits of their heart muscle.
12. Smoking is a risk factor for everything, including cervical cancer. Maybe that’s why there was a cigarette in the peritoneum.
13. It’s always lupus.
14. The most common cause of gout is “partying.”  Ben Franklin: the original Animal House dude.
15. The only effect of Tylenol is to keep dialysis companies in business.
16. Cruise ships are sailing time bombs for Norwalk virus.
17. People who lose weight have cancer and/or depression.
18. If it hurts, it’s just inflammation and you’ll be fine.  If it DOESN’T hurt, it’s cancer and you’ll be dead in 5 years.

Good times.

Here goes

At noon today I closed my books for good.  What I know, I know.  What I don’t — well, that’s just too bad.  (But please, God of Step 1, keep the musculoskeletal stuff to a minimum.)

This has been the most surreal month of my life.  I am very, very glad that tomorrow it will be over.

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Perinatal polycythemia: it’s a viscous cycle.

This horrific pun has been brought to you by Friday Night Study Madness.

End of Week 1

I’ve gone through all the basic sciences/general principles type material (Section II of First Aid), and tomorrow I’m going to take an NBME practice test to see where I stand before starting my systems-based review (the next two weeks).  And then I’m going to take another practice, probably at the test center, before a week of hardcore last minute review.

Starting to lose energy.  Part of me wants to take the damn exam now and get it over with — except I would most certainly fail, and then I would have to do it all over again.

Day 3

I like this idea someone gave me of alternating difficult subjects with easy ones.  Biochem was demoralizing, but today I whizzed through musculoskeletal, derm, genetics, and embryology like no one’s business.  I even had some time left over in my afternoon session so I went back to the storage diseases.  They say you shouldn’t go back — once you’re done with a subject, you’re done — but my attempts to cram a year’s worth of biochemistry into 7 hours was, shall we say, impossible.

Hopefully it won’t rain tomorrow so I can go for a run.  I haven’t gone outside in three days and am starting to turn into the Madwoman in the Attic.

Day 2

The plan for today was to get through First Aid and Rapid Review Biochem.  But then I woke up an hour late, so I had to skip my Goljan run, and even though I technically made it through the books in 3 sessions of 3.5 hours each, I haven’t memorized the storage diseases or the lipoproteinemias.  Or done QBank.

There you go, day 2 and I’m already behind schedule.  This is turning out a little like my New Year’s Resolutions, broken within a week.

Day 1

Today was my first real live, honest-to-goodness Boards Study Day (TM).  I listened to a Goljan lecture on my morning run (yes, they are awesome and no, don’t ask me where to get them), then went to the public library from 10 AM to 5 PM to go through BRS Behavioral Science and First Aid.  There is a quiet study area with cubicles, so I camped there for the day, but it turned out to be an airless, stuffy room, and the woman in the cubicle next to me kept answering her cell phone.  I think I’ll have to find somewhere else to study, which might prove difficult — I checked yelp.com for “best places to study” in my suburban home town and the only result was … Spa World?  Maybe coming home to study wasn’t the greatest idea after all.

Anyway, I came home when the library closed, had dinner, answered about fifteen emails, and then did two blocks’ worth of Kaplan QBank, which I bombed.  As first days go, it wasn’t awful, but I could definitely do better.

Tomorrow is biochem, which will be more hardcore.

The hundred days

I have a date!  Not the exciting “dress up and go to a fancy restaurant” kind*, but a date for that Jabberwock of a Boards exam.  June 11.  Which gives me 100 days exactly to whip myself into shape and (re)learn the last two years’ worth of material.

I’ve made a tentative schedule starting in May, when second year exams finish.  I want to get at least a little studying done over spring break, mainly along the lines of biochemistry, which I majored in, back in the day, but haven’t looked at since.  (My first-year course directors were like “Biochem? Screw that.  Let’s teach you more anatomy instead!”  Well done, first-year course directors.)

I don’t know.  There’s no denying that this is going to be tough, but now that I’ve got a date and a schedule and some direction, it feels a lot more doable. Go go gadget boards study!

* There’s going to be some of that, too, for post-exam.  One of the third years advised making big plans for the night of the exam, so that you have something to look forward to.  So I’m going to round up as many of my friends as possible and plan for a fancy-schmancy dinner somewhere in the city.  It’ll be good with a capital Fantastic.

Spawn of Pfizer/Merck/Whoever

I usually just go to the grocery store and buy everything in sight, but with the recent monetary crunch (thank you, Step 1, for costing a veritable pound of flesh!) I figured I’d better just make a list.

I am going to be the only person at Fairway with a shopping list headed Metaglip (glipizide and metformin HCl tablets).  Which is quite appropriate, as the only reason I’m going to the store at all is to buy ingredients for red velvet cupcakes for tonight.

Happy Valentine’s Day!  Avoid the metabolic syndrome, if you can!

It’s done

I finally got my act together and sent in my application to take Step 1.

Now for the really difficult part: deciding where I want to take it (New York or my hometown) and deciding WHEN I want to take it.  I’m thinking mid-June, so as to give myself a couple of weeks off before third year starts and I disappear into the hospital forever ‘n’ ever.

Basically, I am the most indecisive medical student in the world.  I can’t even pick a place to study for my pulm exam on Monday; how’m I going to make it through Boards?  Answer: lots of coffee.  And Richard Curtis movies.  And more coffee.  My organic lab professor in college taught us how to free-base caffeine (and sundry other alkaloids).  Who knew orgo lab might come in useful some day?