Schedule for tomorrow:

6:30 alarm clock will go off
6:30.05 snoozer will be depressed
repeat every 9 minutes for next hour
7:30 awaken in a panic
7:35 shower in a panic
7:50 dress in a panic
7:59 shove papers aside in a panic looking for scheduling ticket
8:10 leave house ten minutes later than planned on, hope testing location is easy to find
8:30 arrive at testing center after missing a turn, not being able to find building and driving around in a panic
8:35 hand over cell phone, backpack, all papers
8:40 listen to instructions about how to click buttons on a computer and to keep my identification number with me at all times.
9:00 start multiple choice questions. 7 blocks. 50 questions per block. 60 minutes per block. I’ll be done with each section with approximately 10 minutes left. This amount will increase with each section.
11:20 Ten minute bathroom/water break
12:30ish Lunch break
4:30 Finish with test. Have major migraine. Neck stiff. Brain beyond dumb. Can’t tell you how I did. May have passed. May have not. Don’t really care anymore.
5:00 at home. Will splurge and call my friends, who I haven’t spoken to in at least a month. Hope I don’t cry.
And Saturday, I get to wake up and do the whole day over again! Yay!

No magical ball or fortune-telling here. Just exhausting, repetitive experience. It’ll be four blessed years before I have to go through this (officially–I’ll be taking “in-training exams” that are oh-so-similar twice a year for the next four years, but thankfully, those don’t count for anything), and that’s what’s keeping me going.

Wish me luck?

So, my little hometown apparently has two escaped convicts on the lam. Murder convicts at that. Luckily, it appears they have left town and were spotted 40 miles away, so I can stop freaking out about my parents’ safety. It’s a town of about 250 people, where nobody locks their house or car and we live out away from town–not the best combination with unsavory people around. The sheriff’s department is receiving a lot of flack about the escape (and they should receive some criticism about safety concerns as this is not the first escape and to the department of corrections who should have never put such dangerous criminals out in a county jail to begin with), but I’m really getting tired of reading all of the news articles, editorials and comments from people who really have no idea how small towns work and how truly small my little hometown is.

*grumbles*

In other news. I have the day off tomorrow. What I really, really want to do is get in my car and go driving up into one of the nearby lakes, have a picnic lunch and take pictures of the gorgeous fall leaves. Instead, I will be cooped inside studying, because I take Step 3 on Friday and Saturday (2 days of 8 hour testing! YAY!) and since studying during my ICU month wasn’t nearly as productive as I had hoped, I will be doing some major cramming. I’ve found it very difficult to study on my own–for the past how many years, I’ve had a partner, and even if we did most of our studying separately, at least you knew there was equal suffering and if you had a question, then you could bounce it off and come up with the answer. I’m horribly distracted when I’m by myself (I watched the entire first season of Friday Night Lights in the last week. Not good. For my studies, that is. The show is awesome and I’m addicted and I promise, it’s not really about football and I’ll stop now). Also, I haven’t found a good study place–I found a coffee house just around the corner that showed promise–until I saw that it closes at 4 pm!! I miss my Beehive Teahouse or Coco’s Cafe (yeah, I’m a little homesick right now).

All I need to do is pass, because retaking this thing would be nightmarish.

I return to the neurology department on Sunday. Which I’m not exactly looking forward to. I really had a great month this month (even if I didn’t get the number of procedures that I wanted: 3 central lines, 1 that was a failure, 2 arterial lines and I missed both of those. No intubations. Bugger. Oh, and not one real code. Still useless at ACLS.) and any change isn’t going to be as good. I’ve been away from neurology for so long, that I really don’t feel like a part of the department–I’ve been left out of social invitations, I haven’t been able to go to the business meetings, etc. Plus with all of the drama recently over call schedules, well, I don’t want to get sucked back into all of the (pointless) drama.