the underwear drawer

a supposedly fun thing i'll (hopefully) never do again

You know I've taken five Board exams in my life now? Five! That's a lot of exams! There were the three "Steps" of the USMLE (the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam) in 2001, 2002 and 2004, my written Anesthesia boards last August, and now this one. This was my only oral board exam though, and the key difference between a written and an oral exam is the difference between feeling publicly stupid instead of privately stupid. On a written exam, you just guess at the answer, put a star next to it, and move on; whereas on a written exam, you have to say something out loud, even if it's not right, and then you have to just have to try and keep going on as the echos of your wrongness reverberate throughout the room until you are crushed in an avalanche of shame boulders. Or at least so it seems inside your head.

But anyway--the oral boards! End of the story: they went fine. Compared to some of the more brutal practice sessions I'd been through, it was pretty straightforward, though that isn't to say that there were a few things here or there that didn't quite jump from the fountain of universal knowledge to the tip of my tongue. But it went fine, I think, and at the very least, it's over. I get the results in about a month.

But on to the more important issues...this is what I wore:




Excuse the blurriness of the photo, as well as the fact that there is stuff all over the floor (including a lampshade) which makes us look like we live like meth addicts. To our credit, the lamp was Ikea (read: readily broken) and, having outlived its usefulness as a light source, Mack has been wearing the shade as a hat. Because he's a party animal in a Rodney Dangerfield movie. Oh, yes, the blurriness. When we moved into this house, one of the first things we did was try and clean all the mirrors, because it looked like they were super dusty. But what we found was that the dust and grime is not on the surface of the mirror, rather on the inside of the mirror, presumably where the reflective surface meets the glass backing. It's an old house, and they are old mirrors. So we've just gotten used to looking at ourselves through a glaze of mid-century dust motes. However, large-scale information is transmitted.

As several other people who have seen this dress in the flesh warned me, the V-neck was a little bit low, even for a flat-chested lady, but I wore a camisole underneath it, and also the green scarf you see. Ain't no one going to be looking at my funbags. As you can see, the dress ended up being a little long as expected, but nothing that needed to be altered. Also: the shoes I love, and they were from Target, their cuteness only enhanced by their cheapness. It was a little cold this morning, so I also put on a yellow cardigan, which also looked sprightly and preppy, but possibly made me stand out a bit, in that everyone else taking the exam that session (and I mean everyone--men and ladies) was wearing a full suit in either navy, black, or charcoal. Compared to them, I looked like the eccentric Psychology professor who swans in at the beginning of lecture in some Pucci caftan wearing those half-profile reading glasses made of blocky rainbow plastic. But I do hate wearing a suit.

Oh, I don't want to push this "I'm so wacky!" thing too far--because whatever, I'm so not wacky--but I didn't have a watch to wear to my exam (in the interest of keeping my hands and wrists as clean as possible at work, I stopped wearing a watch a few years ago, and though I use my cell phone as a clock I obviously couldn't bring that into the testing room) so I borrowed Cal's:




I am not going to tell you anything about the questions that they asked on the exam, of course, because that's illegal, but I can tell you about the exam process, because I think the mechanics are fairly widely known. The oral board exam administered by the American Board of Anesthesiology are conducted in a hotel, which they say is done to keep the costs down of renting a freestanding facility to administer an exam to 1300 applicants over the period of a week. The Spring 2010 session is being administered at the Buckhead Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta, which I've never been in, but looks like a pretty nice hotel. It also looks like a pretty expensive hotel, which makes me doubly glad that I live in Atlanta already (there's no rule that you have to stay at the hotel that the test is at, but a lot of people from out of town don't want to have to rent a car and have to figure out how to get to the test site, especially if they're only flying in for 24 hours).

The day started with a brief registration and orientation session, where they checked our IDs and a very nice avuncular anesthesiologist from Durham, NC (no doubt he teaches at the Big University Hospital there that also starts with a D) told us what to expect. He also tried to calm us all down by being super-encouraging and telling us that we had all already passed the exam, because we had gotten this far and had the right stuff, baby! "This is a great day!" he told us. "You've already done the work! Have fun in there!" He was adorable, I loved him. (He also reminded us not to get mad if Bad Stuff happened to our patients despite our best efforts, because that was the point of the exam, to see how we deal with Bad Stuff. Also, THE PATIENTS AREN'T REAL.)

There are two exam "sessions," each lasting exactly 35 minutes and primarily made up of a large "stem question" (usually a patient presentation in the setting of an operative plan). The first session has a big stem with a fairly extensive patient history and preoperative workup--the main focus of this session is in intra- and postoperative management of the patient--and the second session has a shorter stem, with the questions focusing on pre- and intraoperative care. Also to round out each session is a handful of what they call "grab bag" questions, which is to say that they are shorter, freestanding questions that they can ask about, well, anything. You have time to look over each "stem" before you go into the room (there is a series of exam rooms down one whole hallway on several different floors of the hotel--just regular hotel rooms that I believe the board examiners are actually sleeping in after hours) and at the end of each session, someone knocks on the door with a wooden spoon, indicating that your time is up.

This was my favorite part, by the way, the knocking on the door with a wooden spoon. It's a cross between formalized and ridiculous, like something they would do in Skull and Bones. (The other reason it was my favorite part was because that meant the session was over.)

There were no big surprises on the exam. The examiners were poker-faced, as they were supposed to be, and sometimes they would try to push you or tangle you up, "Why not this?" "Someone suggests XYZ might be a better solution--what do you tell them?" But on the whole that was expected and it was fair and before I knew it, the second wooden spoon was rapping on my door and it was over.

So now what do I do? For as long as I remember, I've always had something hanging over my head--either the next set of revisions for my book, or some kind of exam that I had to study for. And now I don't have either of those things. I still will have to take Boards for the rest of my professional life, of course, but if I pass the orals, I don't think I'll have to recertify for something like ten years from now. Even I can't start studying for an exam that's ten years away. So now what do I do? Pick up bocce? Start watching more TV? The possibilities are endless.




Now if you'll excuse me, there's a celebratory hummus quartet with my name on it.