Get me off the rock

I'm ready to be done. This was painfully apparent last night, when I was getting ready for the ICM shelf, and suddenly fell into that "I-just-don't-give-a-damn-about-this-exam" mentality I hadn't felt since undergrad (and is surely my reason for being here in the first place). The clouds eventually passed, though, I and got back to it. Luckily, it turned out to be the second easiest shelf I've ever taken - nothing makes me happy like seeing Kaiser Fleischer rings, and wondering what they could possibly ask me about Wilson's disease. You see, at this stage in the game, it's all still cluster bridges - I've realized that the NBME (who owns my soul as much as Sallie Mae, I now realize) merely wants to see if I can put 2 and 2 together. I'm sure I've said this before, but these are paper patients, and they're relatively easy.

Hold on there...I didn't say med school was easy. I said that paper patients can be simple - if you (1) can identify the organ system (2) have read about the cluster of disorders they're talking about and (3) have memorize some descriptor of each, it's really not that bad. They aren't like real patients - who don't always read the books, and who don't always realize that symptom A is supposed to belong to Disease 637. Paper patients are simple in that, when we make mistakes, it means a wrong answer - not a dead patient.

Perhaps it's the redundancy that's got me feeling this way. Our final test on the island is on Thursday, and I'm reviewing things for the third and fourth time now. I feel like King Solomon - "There's nothing new under the sun" - but without all the wisdom and women. And perhaps it's good that I'm feeling this way; it may mean that I've actually learned and understood something. It's gotten to the place where some "new" piece of medical evidence will be published, and my response is a very articulate "Duh...." coupled with an eye-roll, as I mentally run through the pathophysiological explanation why what they've said makes sense.

And somehow, I'm still aware that as far as the practice of medicine goes, I don't know squat.