Setbacks

I hate to keep making depressing posts frequently on this blog, as it wasn't my intention for this blog to become a "rants" sort of blog.

Just when I thought the haunting experience of my surgery rotation was behind me, I got an email on Tuesday afternoon informing me that I had failed the anesthesia portion of the examination. Now, naturally being that all of us in medical school are overachievers and have never failed anything in our lives before, I was stunned and traumatized.

Luckily I have managed to get a few answers about the prognosis of this grade and so far have been reassured. The course director informed me that whether or not this will be in my narrative evaluation will be determined by my retake score and my clinical evaluations; if they are above average, they won't be reported. While they will be always a part of my academic record (blah...) they won't necessarily find their way into my Dean's Letter.

I could write pages about why this happened and how I could've done better but the fact that is that we're all human and we all fuck up sometime. Some students fail a tiny exam, some students fail an important one, and some students fail a whole academic year. I'm lucky that the latter didn't happen to me but being that this is a 3rd year clerkship exam, it is a pretty big deal. I was a huge mess when I first found the news out but talking to a few people in the academics department reassures me that things may work out fine. Anesthesia isn't a core core rotation, but it's still a required clerkship so it still looks not good that I failed the exam. It was a rough exam and surgery left me traumatized. The exam was a huge blur, but I remember it being quite difficult, nitpicky, and all the answer choices seemed correct to me.

But I'm going to be the bigger person and try to look past all of this. We all have setbacks and this rotation and exam was mine. I hope it doesn't bode an ominous future for my residency applications given that my Step 1 score was subpar to begin with and this adds another (hopefully tiny) red flag. I'm going to choose to forget this happened, study my butt off for the retake, and put this all behind me. I won't let it affect my drive to study for my current rotation's  shelf exam which is next Friday. Let's hope this works out well. Hopefully have some beauty posts soon, I'm sorry I've been such a slacker! Life's just been crazy crazy crazy these past few months....