Kok, Killer of Exams

"This was a triumph
I'm making a note here: Huge success
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction"

Still Alive (2007) written by Jonathan Coulton,
performed by Ellen McLain as GLaDOS

Hello internet people things! I am, at the moment, at large in Butterworth. This is a canned post, by the way, written offline in my girlfriend's apartment and then upped onto the intertubes in a cyber cafe. Not dreadfully convenient but this is just what I have to live with till Phoebe gets herself some sweet, sweet broadband access. I'm here for my elective program with the Orthopaedic Department of the Seberang Jaya Hospital and due to some clerical incompetence on the part of the State Health Department, I'm starting next Monday instead of today. No biggie, I guess - I can do with some serious R&R time anyway.

That's where I am now.

Just in case you are interested, I just slew my 4th year exam and I am officially a 5th year medico. Let me tell you that that was possibly the most effort I've ever invested in a single examination. All my life, I have never done more than study on the night before a paper. This time around, I actually managed to cut 4-6 hours a day for swot-time. Of course, by the time the second leg of the study break came on, I was already burned out. Completely. Burned. Out. It was not a total loss though. I managed to take in 7 seasons of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and finish watching the entire Avatar: The Last Airbender series in that week.

And in keeping with my promise to myself that I will never let anything get between me and novels, I also managed to finish reading Dan Simmon's Ilium, and all I needed to do was take half-an-hour breaks out of the middle of each of my study sessions. I made that promise years ago to prove an old book-nerd friend of mine wrong. He went to med school too and told me that there is simply no time or place for pleasure reading in a med student's schedule. My contention is that there is always, always time for good reads.

Still, that exam was possibly the only one to ever give me a real sense of the danger of failing. I have had nightmares about it. I even picked up a stress-related disorder during the study break; it's called proctalgia fugax, which is Latin for guerrilla butt-hurt. It wakes me up two hours into my sleep twice a week and sends me to the bathroom to attend to a fruitless bowel false alarm. Supposedly, it's common amongst med students and interestingly enough; people with prolonged um, unattended erections.

Anyhow, it's gone now. The butt-hurt, not the erections, haha.

I'll try and update on more regular basis here in Butterworth for the benefit of some of my friends which might want to get up to speed with what I'm up to (as small a set as that may be). In fact, check back tomorrow. I got another post scheduled to launch on my queue.

This is going to be a grand month. I can feel it.

Slayer of tests,
Sir k0k s3n w4i