Surgery Shelf Exam

Today's shelf was at 8:00 a.m. (much to many people's dismay), and for the most part, the surgery shelf exam was surprisingly not too bad. Compared to psych, it was more manageable for sure. To prepare for it, I read Blueprints Surgery Cases twice, did Kaplan questions, and did sample tests from various other books from the library. But...time was my worst enemy. One hour into the exam I'd only answered 45 questions, so for the latter half of the exam I rushed through most of the questions in order to give myself at least 10 minutes to answer the questions I'd skipped. One question I almost answered "pyloric stenosis" as soon as I saw "nonbilious emesis" but I later reread the question and found that the age wasn't right, and therefore changed my answer. *sigh* Hopefully I didn't fail; surgery is one thing I don't want to repeat (and it's not like I didn't study)

After the shelf we had Residency 101 followed by the Residency Fair itself. Sharon, Natacha, and I were walking past the Driscoll table when we saw...Dr. VJ! Surprisingly, he remembered our faces (even though Sharon and I haven't seen him since July) and said it was good to see us again. Also there was Dr. SC; I said hello and reminded him that we were on call together once. "I hope that was a good learning experience," he said. It was: I saw a baby with pyloric stenosis =) Most of the programs there were family med programs, which I was not really interested in (where are the medicine programs?), but it was good to look around anyway. Afterwards a bunch of us (Ben, Justin, Kristen, Erwin, Cyril, Stephanie, Dina, Heather, Fallon, me) went to Red Hot and Blue to celebrate Cyril's belated birthday. Since it was 2:30 by the time we arrived, I just got a blackberry cobbler (good stuff) It was good catching up with friends and finding out what we want to specialize in, as well as discussing our various rotation experiences with the same doctors or residents. After hearing that other people have already set up many of their rotations for the fall, it's time for me to get started, too. It's not like surgery gave me much time to think about the future.