People have been emailing me asking where I have been! Ha! I haven’t disappeared lads, I’m just not doing anything of note. We have our final exams in a week and the usual head-in-the-sand approach has prevailed yet again. Our friendly Pathologist sat us down today for an exhausting story time: one-and-a-half hours off the top of his head on… well… everything we need to know for next week on the central nervous system, the kidney, endocrine and heamatology. Tropical medicine, as voluminous and exotic as the lectures were, has been boiled down to ‘read AIDS and malaria, and maybe schistosomiasis’ – the latter being some sort of snail/worm infestation that Egyptian swimmers get. So you can see the relevance there.

The Final Meds got their results today and congratulations abound on Facebook – the realisation that our cohort is HALFWAY THERE (just about, anyhow) is astounding. Time flies when you’re having fun* – the December exams seem like yesterday; perhaps because the weather hasn’t changed much. Since I last blathered on, I have come into the princely sum of, well, a lady never says but let’s just say my summer holidays this year will be to the sound of steel drums echoing across a Caribbean beach. (Thanks very much to whoever found my fifty euro note in that Cardiology prize essay competition). 

I have also found myself, quite unexpectedly and rapidly, in a new relationship which means school has taken a back seat to exciting things like going to the cinema and driving around the Dublin mountains in the middle of the night. I don’t think my exams will particularly suffer but let’s just say this term I have chosen fun and relaxation over T-scores. Oh wait, they’re not giving us T-scores anymore (how we know where we came in the class relative to our peers’ grades). I think this is a great idea and really releases the pressure that all med students feel, but don’t necessarily admit, to forget our classmates are our friends and annihilate them with our superior knowledge come exam time. This removal of what can be quite a nasty competitive edge has not sat well with all of us, however – let’s just say a few hyper nerdy types have been having an oul’ moan at the new system. Some other colleges (Limerick I think?) operate on a basic green-yellow-red grades basis which I quite like the sound of but I think at this stage it would go down like a lead balloon amongst those of us who were used to getting 99.9% in tests in undergrad. Luckily, as a law graduate, anytime I see the number 6 I’m happy so it makes no odds to me!

A lot of my peers are doing the USMLE Step 1 (American boards) at the end of this summer and so, basically, have a pretty crap few months ahead of them before launching into the clinical years in September. The ambitious side in me was all for this sort of thing until about January when we had to do a sort of mock exam to make sure we were ready for Step 1 and I quickly decided that a career in the States, compared with a relaxing summer 2012, didn’t seem too appealing. I have a month’s elective in September in a super exciting field – let’s just say I might be spending some of it in an actual field – sorted out, a bit of research (nothing too vexing) to do in June/July and the whole month of August free to eat my way through a nice box of books from Amazon with C-class smut and scandal written all over it.  (Via the Caribbean and some sort of all-inclusive package that means I will probably spend much of August reading said books in the gym).

I’m off now to have a normal Friday night out as my best friend in the whole world has decided to come home from Australia, fittingly, in the middle of exam season and so I feel only obliged to throw my hands up to the gods of fate (or something) and join her on a night of cocktails and dancing (stumbling? Yeah, you know what I mean). Tomorrow I will be paying for this indulgence by having to read about the nervous system (pet hate) and spinal pathways and all that sort of hideous stuff while hungover and cerebellarly-challenged. See? I’m a martyr to my own cause, inducing the very symptoms I read about. That, my friends, is method med-studenting.

Congrats to all those who found out today that they are no longer impoverished students, but are now, finally, impoverished doctors. Halfway there!

*on a budget and between learning stuff