If the epr theory was the sandman, then the epr osce was the venom. It was uglier, freakier, darker.. ugh. Thinking about it even now makes me shudder although it is a thing of the past for me now. Picture this in your head: walking into the consultation room (instead of the other way round, like how real doctors are seated in their office) and trying to figure out what is wrong with the 'patient' can be quite cumbersome especially if you have got the examiner breathing down your neck (not literally lol, but it felt like that) and their beety eyes boring into your back and this uneasiness that appears to grow immensily with every sec that mercilessly ticks away. Trust me, it can be overwhelming especially when the word osce itself makes you wanna punch the shit outta the person who created it. During my med school days, the closest we came to a clinical test was the actual patient confrontation that formed the gist of our final clerkship year and well osce is roughly that.. You gotta know what to say and what to do to the patient (physical examination). I dreaded the osce mainly because I was fed with the wrong kinda insight about it.. like some said it might involve having to perform an IV insertion or episiorraphy within a stipulated time. Can you imagine getting all that done within minutes? At that time, I felt like walking into my own death scene and not knowing in what manner I would end up getting killed. In my opinion, it 'at least' helps to know what I can expect although the end result would be just as bad. I was so sure that I was going to be able to identify a collapsed lung in a pneumothorax case but I pointed at the wrong lung and lost some points there. I was pretty sure that I messed up the Obstetrics station as well as I got confused and in that tensed moment I identified the fetal's back as on my right instead of the maternal's left. Good job 😏. All the while as I trudged on miserably and defeated from one station to another, the only thing I tried hard was not to lose my composure and just start panicking or worse, run outta there flunking the whole exam even before it ended. 'Fake it till you make it'.. that's what that I kept chanting to myself repeatedly. Looking at the faces of the other candidates was not useful because they all had unreadable expressions on each of them. Perhaps I was the only one who would have to retake this exam next year.. or so I thought.. but after weeks (it took them almost 2 months) of sleepless nights and anxiety biting away at the remnants of my sanity, the result was sent to my email and guess what? I made it. Yup. This klutzy stuttering girl had been FINALLY relieved from the entire ordeal of having to pay the price for studying at an unrecognized university. Yeah some of you smart alecs would go about crying the same foul song that I deserve this because I chose to study there instead of investing half a million to study locally. I am not that rich okay! In fact I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would get to study for something that I could never exchange for anything else. I trusted my knowledge and in spite of the numerous negative retorts I received, I went ahead and fought the battle till there was nothing left in me. Nothing helped ease the trouble I faced in preparing for the osce epr; not the prep course nor the other candidates or even the materials I found online.. I think it was self-realization and coaching that made this possible for me. To the people out there who are going around spreading false info about the exam and discouraging and instilling unneeded fear in candidates who are yet to sit for the exam, be it the theory part or the clinical part, please stop doing that because you are not helping anyone by doing that. You are just adding stress in people who are already stressed. Any exam in this world is passable if you put in the effort.
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