It's the big week (I accidentally just wrote "beek week"). My Principles of Surgery exam is tomorrow and Wednesday...which may leave you all wondering why I'm writing in my blog instead of studying. Yeah, I'm wondering the same thing. I've actually managed to amuse myself on all sorts of non-studying related things so far today.
So for the next two afternoons (fortunately, it's only 3 hours both days) I will be spending my time answering such questions as "What is the chemical substance in snake venom that permits it to spread via the lymphatics?" Options: a) hiruden (no, that's found in leeches, another topic that likes to show up on this exam...it inhibits blood clotting) b) papain (I have no idea what that is) c) hyaluronidase (the right answer) or d) I can't remember the other option. Don't ask me how this is relevant to principles of surgery, but apparently it is. One of my friends, who is a family doctor, thought this should be a short answer question, in which I write about how as a surgeon I don't need to know this because obviously my solution to any snake bite would be to amputate before the chemical managed to make it through to the lymphatics. Sadly, that's not an option.
Other interesting trivia: There's an entire chapter in my surgical textbook dedicated to "The Surgeon's Role in Unconventional Disasters." These include such things as terrorist attacks, bioterrorism (which I guess falls under terrorist attacks - thinks like the plague, anthrax, smallpox, etc), radiation terrorism, and other lovely things. The very last table in the chapter is called "Things Surgeons can do to enhance their response to terrorist attack." Nothing too earth-shattering in that table, though. I didn't bother reading that chapter, so I sincerely hope there aren't any questions about that on the exam! I'm too busy figuring out which cytokine causes the proliferation of fibroblasts, which chemotherapy drug has which side effect, whether you do or don't use branched chain amino acids in nutrition for patients in kidney failure, and that sort of thing. There are some questions that are actually principles in surgery, but there's a lot more trivia. And the other thing that's fun about it is that a lot of the questions are outdated, so you don't quite know which answer they're looking for (but chances are it's not the one that's currently correct!). It makes it a fun "read my mind" kind of game.
No matter, because Wednesday evening it will be over. I looked up the pass rates on the Royal College Website, and there's a 92% pass rate for this exam, which is pretty good. They don't tell you what you have to get on it to pass, or how many questions are actually on the exam, or anything else particularly useful, but a pass rate of 92% is good to know about.
Then Wednesday evening I'm hopping on a plane to go for a quick visit to my friends in Quebec City. I haven't seen them in a year-and-a-half or so, so that will be nice. I'm coming back Sunday, and then am back at work again Monday.
Enough procrastinating...back to studying.
