One more hurdle down

This morning, I passed my ICM history and physical exam test! We had 20 minutes to take a history from a patient (one of the ICM faculty) and then 40 minutes, with a partner, to complete a full physical. Most people have probably never had an entirely complete physical, but they take a little while, if done correctly. The grading sheet they used had over 200 points that they were supposed to make sure we hit on!

The case that I had to take a history for and diagnose wound up being intermittent claudication. The word "claudication" did not seem to want to come to me this morning, but I did manage to get out "intermittent vasoconstriction," which means essentially the exact same thing and was good enough to pass. If you're interested, it presented as an overweight 60 something year old man with pain in his calf after periods of walking, which subsided after a few minutes of rest.

The physical exam was not very difficult, after doing it for the past 3 semesters, over and over and over again, in ICM. Like I said, it's pretty involved and covers EVERYTHING, but when you do it as often as we have to in ICM, it kind of just comes to you. Fortunately, that is the last history and physical that I'll be doing on a mock patient; the next time will be a real patient in the hospital!

Unfortunately, I'm not so confident about my chances of passing this first comp exam on Thursday. The end is in sight, but right now, it's just a faint light...far off in the distance. I'll definitely make it through the Goljan path lectures before then, but that's about all I'll have time for. That only leaves biochem, physio, anatomy, histo, genetics, pharm, and behavioral to go! Fortunately, Goljan integrates a lot and touches on all of those subjects, but probably not enough for this exam in 2 days! So, I should probably get back to it!