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So the exam today went dreadfully. The only thing that I know, is that I don’t know anything.

Loads of people were coming out of the exam saying that they’d done badly and won’t have passed many questions (the pass requirement for our exams is based on how many questions you pass, rather than your overall percentage), but you know that really they’ll have done really well. When I say it though, I mean it. There were things on the paper that I don’t even recall ever learning about, let alone have revised and could answer questions on them! All of the topics which I’m confident on didn’t come up, not one. Additionally, my brain was so fuzzy that I struggled coming up with basic information (such as what the uterus was called…). All in all, unless a miracle occurs and I get everything right in tomorrow’s paper (which lets face it, is highly unlikely), I’m going to be doing re-sits.

The thing is though, at this point I’m questioning if I’ll even be able to pass re-sits, even with the extra few weeks of revision time. I work hard but I just don’t seem to be able to retain the amount of information required. Not everyone’s cut out for medicine, and maybe I’m one of them? Throughout high school I was that annoying person who got close to 100% without having to really work for it, but since then I’ve slowly been losing my work ability. Things used to come really easilyy to me, but now I’ll work my butt off and still only be mediocre. Maybe I’m just dumbing down as I’m aging, or maybe it’s just that phenomenon of bringing together all these smart, type A personalities at med school, and unfortunately not everyone can be the best, someone has to be at the bottom of the pile.

Throughout my life my family haven’t put deliberate “you must do well or we’ll disown you” pressure on me, but a different type of pressure; the “you’re the smart one in the family, you work hard so we know you’ll do well’ pressure. The type of pressure that is worse because they’re just being nice but they’ve got such high expectations of you that to disappoint them would be worse than failing itself. Even my boyfriend’s the same. I love them, but I wish they’d just say “we understand that this is really hard and it won’t be the end of the world if you don’t succeed”. Everyone’s so proud of me going to med school, that to flunk out now would be horrible, but if I’m struggling at this stage, how will I make it over the next 3 years?

I’m sorry for this abundance of self-pity. As you can probably tell, I’m feeling pretty deflated after this morning’s exam and don’t really feel as though I can talk to anyone in real life about it. Hopefully tomorrow's exam won’t be quite so disastrous and then I can just put them out of my head and work towards OSCEs and resits.