Thursday, October 27, 2011

Hell Week

Well, I just finished the week that everyone refers to as "Hell Week" and just barely survived. Hell Week consists of 5 tests in four days and is allegedly the roughest week of the entire semester.

On Monday I had my second anatomy lecture exam, which wasn't too terrible. Although, I felt like I threw up all the information I knew onto that test and felt nervous for the practical the following day. I also had my "standard patient interview" with a faculty member in which he pretended to be a patient coming to my clinic and I had to gain information about him and his injury, hitting a number of must-asks, in an appropriate manner. No problem. Passed with flying colors.

On Tuesday we had our first "check offs" in clinical skills. Check offs consist of palpations and then either gait training/transfers/etc depending on what we have learned. The first check off was palpations of the lower limb and the shoulder and then gait training. You are given 3 structures to find for the palpation part (at random; you choose when you arrive at your check off time) and then you're given a patient situation in which you need to demonstrate appropriate interactions and decision making on choosing the correct assistive device (walker, crutches, cane, etc) for the patient. My check-off was terrible; as I've been writing from time to time I'm having a rough adjustment into school and haven't been happy since I started (in fact, to be honest, I've been quite miserable 95% of the time), thus it was a train-wreck that resulted in me having to re-take the check-off on Thursday.

Also, on Tuesday I had my anatomy practical exam. After my terrible morning I was feeling even more distraught about school and honestly didn't even feel like taking the practical; I just wanted to quit school and go home. But, I'm not going to make a rash decision when emotions are high, so of course I stayed and took it. And it was hard. There were too many people in the room so I couldn't follow my thought process and when the professor called "5 minutes" I had about 10 blank answers. I didn't stay to watch him grade it and later got my grade off the internet... 74%. Ouch. :(

On Wednesday, I had a free day. Some people were still doing their patient interviews, but I had done that on Monday, so it was a quick breather for me.

On Thursday, I had my clinical skills written exam, which went pretty darn well. It's not that I don't know the information, or that it's too hard, it's just that it makes me severely unhappy and I need to decide if I'm unhappy because I am constantly stressed or I'm unhappy because this is not right for me. Also, after the written exam I had to redo my check-offs, and I, of course, passed with a 100% and celebrated with lunch with my one classmate.

So, I am now home and feeling much better because there is no stress on me, however, as soon as it is time for another round of tests I will be feeling the exact same way, so I've decided to go to counseling to see if they can help me sort through all of this so I can make an educated decision that I won't regret.

Until then, I guess I'll just try to deal with being miserable.

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