Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of ‘9/11’. After 9/11, Jon Stewart gave a speech to open The Daily Show, a speech which I posted here back in June 2006.

Such is the power of the speech that yesterday tens of blogs linked to it on this site, providing over 130,000 extra hits, and propelling it comfortably to the top of the ‘most popular posts’ league. When a speech that is six years old can still generate this kind of response, it surely must be a great speech.

What a shame that politicians have moved so far from their people that it was left to a comedy newsreader to truly speak to the nation in the face of its greatest tragedy in many generations.

Just a bit of closure. It’s important that you pronounce ‘closure’ in a psuedo-psyhiatrist voice with some accompanying hand motion when you read that. Go back and do it.

The good news is that I got ‘satisfactory’ grades in all three strands, which is most satisfactory as my final grades from Durham. So after today’s end-of-year ceremony, I now have the whole summer off before starting up with the University of Newcastle for ‘Phase II’ of the course at the end of August. Time for a rest, I think.

It’s another of those slightly incongruous bits of personal news that slip in here from time to time… Much like last year, my recent exams have not culminated in me having to attend a viva. That’s good news, which fell into my inbox a little under an hour ago. Talk about fresh, breaking news. Yippee.

Today was my final exam of the week: the MCQ/TF/EMI.

This exam consists of three parts: a multiple choice section, which consists of sixty questions with five answer options; a true/false section, which consists of forty true/false questions; and an EMI section, which consists (essentially) of eighty multiple choice questions with up to thirteen answer options.

It didn’t go brilliantly today, and neither did it go terribly. So it’s just a case of being relieved that it’s over, and then waiting to find out whether or not I have a viva, and then there’s just results day to worry about…

Today was my third of four exams: the Non-Clinical OSCE.

This exam contains two parts: An anatomy spot test, which consists of sixty thirty-second questions relating to pinned structures in cadavers, and six five-minute structured questions on anything and everything else. The five-minuters weren’t so bad, with quite a few of them being straightforward enough – and there was no equivalent to the bus timetable question! But the anatomy spotter was horrendous – despite doing a huge amount of anatomy revision, I still didn’t feel confident on almost any of the questions. Having said that, I usually feel that way, though it was, perhaps, a little worse today. It’s difficult to judge.

Tomorrow I have the day off; my next exam is Friday afternoon, for the MCQ/TF/EMI paper.

Today was my second exam: the Clinical OSCPE.

This exam is all about doing things with patients. As usual, there were three stations with a patient at each, and each with a time limit of five minutes. On the first patient, I was required to test eye movements and answer lots of questions about nerve supplies to the eye muscles, and explain why certain movements might be hindered. The second patient was playing a pregnant lady, to who I had to give lifestyle advice. With the third patient, I had to elicit different arm reflexes, and explain various things about them, such as the range of results possible from a reflex test and the causes of these results.

Overall, I think I did okay. There are obviously things that I could have done better looking back, but that’s to be expected when you’ve had hours to digest what you were asked to do, but I certainly feel more confident about this particular exam than I did last year. However, like last time, I’m dreading tomorrow’s Non-Clinical OSCE the most… check back tomorrow to see how it goes!

Today, I had my first exam: the DIPSE paper.

This essentially consists of the traditional short-answer exam questions. At almost fifty pages, it’s certainly one of the longest exams I’ve ever done, and ended up taking the full three hours available. There were quite a few questions on which I had little idea, but on the whole I think I probably scored above the pass mark, so I’m quite happy. To summarise: Not fantastic, not terrible.

Tomorrow: Clinical OSCPEs.

For the coming week, I’m once again in an exam period. As has become almost traditional (see here and here), I’ll be letting you know how I get on each day. The week works out so that I have DIPSEs on Monday, Clinical OSCEs Tuesday, Non-Clinical OSCEs Wednesday, and MCQ/TF/EMI on Friday. I’ll explain all as I go along. So watch out for the first post, about the DIPSEs, tomorrow.

I’ve had a breakdown of my exam results today, question-by-question. I was very happy, because there wasn’t a single question I got nothing on, and I got 100% on two questions.

It seems clear that I won’t be the best doctor to ask about Epidermolysis Bullosa (20% – and I don’t even remember ever hearing about it in my life!), Bacterial Pneumonia (30%), Bacterial blood cultures (20%), Tanzanian Blood Smears (10% – but when am I ever going to go to Tanzania anyway?), fertility (25% – but I did get 50% on infertility, and it would seem more likely that that’s what a doctor would deal with), or kidney transplantation (30%).

But I’m practically an expert on Enterococcus Faecalis outbreaks (80%), Medical Histories (100%), Health Diaries (70%), Undertaking the Community Placement (100%), E.coli 0157 infection (70%), Spermatozoa structure and function (70%), and Sensitivity and Specificity of tests (95%).

Everything else was inbetween… Prostate Cancer (60%), Blood Glucose (50%), Complement (40% – which is good, considering I still don’t really know what it is or what it does), Anaemia (50%), Male Pelvic Anatomy (62.5%), Pelvic anatomy (60%), EBM (41.67%), cervical smears (37.5%), Iron deficiency anaemia (30.77%), Pelvic osteology (62.5%), Anatomy Spotter (55%), and Mammography (35%). We don’t get a breakdown of the MCQ, but I got 61.94% overall on it.

Given that the pass mark is about 50%, I think I did very well.

I’ve got my results from the January exams today. Unfortunately, a general mix-up with the exam papers means that a number of questions had to be taken off the paper, meaning that I only have results in the ‘What’ and ‘How’ strand. (The three strands, all of which must be passed, are ‘What the doctor is able to do’, ‘The doctor as a professional’, and ‘How the doctor approaches practice’)

I’m very pleased to say that I received ‘S’ in both strands – that’s ‘Satisfactory’, which means I passed! Hooray! So I’m very happy.