Exam worries

Oops, it’s been a while since I’ve last posted. This term is just going really fast and I don’t really know where the time goes! It’s just over 6 weeks until my big scary exams. 6 weeks really doesn’t seem like much revision time at all, especially when these exams aren’t just on this term’s work, but on everything we’ve covered since the start of med school and we don’t finish this term’s teaching until 2 weeks before the exam! It doesn’t help that every weekend seems to be taken up by working locum shifts or with visiting parents or friends. I’m trying to do as much work as I can in all my free time, but it never feels like enough. I had a bit of a freak out a couple of weeks ago that I’d never be able to learn everything in the time, and that everyone else in my year is far smarter than I am, and I just felt really disheartened. I’m feeling a bit better now, but I still have occasional moments of self doubt and panic. I really, really don’t want to have to re-sit these exams (and I don’t even want to think about the possibility of repeating a year). Having to re-sit the summer exams was enormously stressful and took up a big chunk of my summer holiday, and I don’t want a repeat of that. If I pass these exams then I’ll get to enter the clinical phase of the course, which by all accounts sounds a bit more relaxed than the pre-clinical phase, and I wouldn’t have to sit another exam for a whole year! Additionally, we also had to chose a clinical partner a few weeks ago, which we’ll be placed with in clinical rotations, and I’d hate to mess mine about by failing these exams. So all in all, my stress levels are pretty high at the moment.

A little while ago I wrote about being offered a 15 hour locum shift that I turned down. I worked a 10 hour shift at that pharmacy a few weeks ago, and as it turned out to be a really quiet, nice pharmacy (I spent a lot of the shift just doing uni work it was that quiet), I’ve agreed to do a few 15 hour shifts, starting with one this Saturday. I was worried that it was going to be really busy for the whole of the 15 hours which is why I originally turned it down, but now that I know that the majority of the time will likely be really quiet, I don’t feel unsafe working it. I was correct in my previous post in saying that a pharmacy open such long hours in it’s location isn’t really necessary, but I found out it’s because there’s another pharmacy situated a few doors away from it. Regulations mean that new pharmacies opening close to existing pharmacies are only allowed to open if they’re 100 hour opening pharmacies. Pharmacy’s tend to be pretty profitable so I’m sure they’re still making money, even though they are paying a pharmacist and a dispenser to just sit there a lot of the time during the extended hours.