I took my MCCQE Part 1 on Friday. Messed up a few questions and a couple clinical decision making cases marks, but otherwise I felt overall it went as well as it was going to go. Then the weekend of ignorance happened. I mean, just utter ignorance.
I started out by watching back to back episodes of he-man and stargate on Friday, and being exhausted. Then I talked to my friend on the phone (she's writing the MCCQE Part 1 on Wednesday, and we've never met). The next day, I woke up really early .... to rent a car and head to Michigan. My colleague and friend from medical school was having a party to celebrate that he gained a residency and successfully graduated medical school.
I went there, chilled out with him, ate, danced, acted completely ignorant (basically the only non-ignorant thing I did was stay sober, but I haven't drank in years so it wasn't really a big thing for me. No, I'm not an alcoholic, I just didn't really like drinking that much), and then I visited another friend in Michigan later that day. It was a friend who was staying with another friend of mine from med school. Conversation between these two was interesting and amusing because one of them is a nurse, who has a completely different world and life view than the other one, who is a medical student trying to match next year. A woman, she's trying to match into orthopedic surgery, a profession dominated by male hotheads (or so it was described to me by someone else). The funniest story she had was of her and her resident sitting in the on-call room at 3 am during her trauma shift and saying "Hey, we don't have any admissions tonight!" "Yeah, our service is empty, we're not doing much tonight!" "We're just chilling over here, life is goo---" [BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG] heard down the street, three streets away from the hospital. Her and the resident ran down to the emergency room and got there before the ambulance. The nurse asks "We're you paged?!??!" And "Nooo..." was the response, unsure of whether they knew how to diplomatically phrase that they "got the call".
I heard many rumors about the school in the conversation, most of which will be discussed in a subsequent blog entry (some day I have to sit down and review all these campaign promises) but for now we'll summarize by saying I left Michigan at 7 30 and got home around 12 15 am. I was exhausted but still determined to make good on the rental agreement, so I returned the car at 8 am the next day. I put my 5-hours-of-sleep performance to the test by doing questions with a friend to whom I was introduced by a mutual friend. I haven't met her, but she knows my academic history and still decided to call me for help on exam review, which as far as I'm concerned is career suicide, so she can't be all that bright. Whenever I do practice questions or review questions or sample questions, this cold breeze of realized ignorance whips me in the face and I reevaluate how much I'm supposed to punish myself psychologically by hard-reviewing certain diseases or risk factors or associations that were previously not studied or are as of yet unknown to me.
Being an incoming resident physician means I should have some form of ongoing continuing medical education plan set up. And here it is:
1) Read every issue of the American Family Physician (one every two weeks) from now to kingdom come
2) Read every recent review or journal article on every new disease I see in residency
3) Do a certain number (TBD) of board review questions every single day, after my 13 hour shift before my 6-6.5 nightly hours of sleep
4) Read a certain number of pages of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine
5) Read every newly-sent medscape newsletter that pops into my inbox (each newsletter consisting either of a long, detailed quiz or an array of articles on various different topics)
And also find a girlfriend, lose twenty pounds and get a six pack, win a road bike race, get married and start a family, and re-learn and then continue learning how to play guitar.
So who still wants my job? Too bad, it's mine, and don't y'all forget it.
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