I feel incredibly, incredibly lazy today. I've studied for probably five hours and putzed around for another five hours. I guess I should back up though and recap WHY I've only studied for 5 hours.

Monday...yesterday...was our oral board examination. We had three days to cram as much info as we possibly could into our brains and finalize those 50ish ten min presentations. It was probably the longest weekend of my life, and one of the worst to date. It's weird saying that, because in the grand scheme of things it was a great weekend, all I did was study, nothing eventful happened. But the pressure I felt was unbelievable. I can't even think of a good analogy. There was just this underlying panic that wouldn't go away, in the physiological sense (heart rate was pounding, I felt nauseous, I even felt woozy at one point because when I am revved up I have to keep on going to the bathroom...and all that volume loss added up at one point, haha). I didn't feel confident about knowing the material well at all when I went to bed Sunday night, but I think it was a matter of my brain just being so tired out. When I woke up Monday morning my head was a little clearer. All I cared about was passing.

In the morning beforehand I ran over some things I was foggy about (anemia, inflammatory bowel disease treatment, specific neurological deficits that occur based on the artery that is affected in a stroke, etc) with a classmate of mine. Those were the topics I was hoping to not get, but decided to run over them just in case. My classmate's examination was at 8:40, which gave me an hour to run over all my differentials one more time. I'm sure the people in the offices at school were laughing at me because I was pacing with my ipod and flashcards.

I went at 10. I got lucky and was assigned my top choice of faculty members to do the examination. I walked in and got probably the easiest differential of them all, abdominal pain (all you really have to do is think about all the organs in the abdominal cavity and add an -itis to the end). From those, my first presentation topic was....DUN DUN DUN....inflammatory bowel disease (which consists of Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis). It figures I would get one of the ones I didn't want. Conceptually it's not a hard topic, I was just having a hard time keeping the treatment protocols straight. I'm very glad I revisited them in the morning though.

After I finished up with IBD, my second differential was fatigue, which is another easy one. My topic from that was depression, which was one of the ones I hadn't studied as much because I figured I could BS my way through it. At one point my professor said "You're missing a really big lab and diagnostic value," and I thought for two seconds and yelled TSH really loudly (TSH levels are how you assess for hypothyroidism, which can present with depression). I was actually very thankful for my faculty member, she interacted with me more than I thought she would and it helped my grade a little).

When I finished I had a huge grin on my face. I can't explain the feeling that I felt--it was a lot of joy and relief. I still felt super charged up though, so I immediately went to the gym and shot around. I was so excited/hyper about being done that I went home and couldn't even decide what to eat. I was hungry from not eating, but didn't have an appetite. I also didn't know what to do with myself. What do people do when they aren't studying? I felt like I was someone who had been in jail for most of their life, and once they are released they don't know how to function in normal society. I actually got home and started packing, which is good because it helped let off a lot of the energy I still had inside me.

Last night our class decided to go to the outdoor pub place that we went to for our first class social gathering, it was awesome hanging out with my classmates when they weren't stressed out.

So what's next? I have my Behavioral Med final tomorrow (easy) and Pathology final on Thursday (also easy). I'm glad to be finishing up with pathology because we've been doing forensics, and I've seen enough pictures of murder victims and completed suicides and human bodies in various states of decay that I will be set for life. After our final on Thursday, we have training on how to use to the patient logging system that we will be using during rotations. Then the school is giving us a survivor brunch. And then my 10.5 day vacation begins. I'm moving to Jersey and then booking it to both my homes in New England ASAP.

Yup. I'm starting my internal medicine rotation in a week and a half, and I will be seeing and treating patients. Craazzzzzzzzzzyyyyyyyyyyyy.