Okay, so I am supposed to be studying for Step 2 - only a week til that bad boy. But how can I study when I can get live audio feed from the Tour de France? Too distracting! I have made the tactical decision to postpone studying for the 40 minutes or so left until today’s individual time trials are over. It is just toooo exciting to simply check the ticker every several minutes (which has been my studying tactic until today).
I guess I should be thankful (cough) that my cable company doesn’t carry the Outdoor Life Network 
, next week would be totally shot watching TDF instead of studying. 
Do you ever fantasize about what you’d do if you won the lottery? High on my list would be to follow the TDF from start to finish in person - dang that would be fun.
at first I thought 'who is TDF and what's happening with Lance?' LOL !
| QUOTE (Mary Renard @ Jul 18 2003, 09:49 AM) |
| Do you ever fantasize about what you'd do if you won the lottery? |
Yeah, but I don't think my neighbors would appreciate a 30 foot waterslide in my backyard (or maybe they would, who knows).
| QUOTE |
| I don't think my neighbors would appreciate a 30 foot waterslide in my backyard |
Hey, you just gotta let them use it and it's all good!
Mary, get Dish, they have Outdoor Life Network…ooops, maybe you shouldn’t do that… 
Hey Mary,
You don’t need to be as anal about Step II as with Step I. Two weeks is more than enough time to “study” for this exam as long as your internal medicine is tight. The surgical questions are “slap in the face” and the OB-Gyn questions were along the lines of failure to progress during labor. Even better, don’t waste your time studying anything except medicine. Don’t forget to have the biostats formulas in your head. I spent some tome on endocrinology and connective tissue diseases because they didn’t stick in my head.
Take plenty of breaks and watch that Tour de France! Get a good night’s sleep! You are going to be more tired from reading those danged scenarios off that computer screen (400 questions) than anything else. I promise you that you will be fine. Your Step I score was great so you can probably expect to get at least 10 points higher on Step II.
Just review you weaker points in Internal Medicine and get some good rest the night before. The people that I have heard of failing Step II are the ones that spent so much time trying to memorize everything except medicine that they crashed. I just got tired of looking at that stupid screen.
Soon this will be behind you and on to internship!!
Natalie
Well, I may be ready for Step 2 - this morning I decided, f*** studying, at this point I am going to find other things to do…
but Step 2 is not ready for me. Late this afternoon I got a call from Prometric informing me that “technical difficulties” at the test site required them to reschedule me. 
They wanted to put me in for Monday the 28th, which would be FINE except that I have another all day test that day - my recertification as an International Board-Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC). The IBCLC exam is paper-and-pencil - no rescheduling that.
And immediately after the IBCLC exam I planned to jump in my car and head to the beach (again), this time to Ocean City with my mom and three of my four sisters.
So when Prometric offered me Tuesday 7/29, I wasn’t very enthused - man, I wanna be at the BEACH that day dammit.
I think I am going to just end up scheduling it for sometime in August - which will be a lot more complicated, as I’ll have to work around a rotation schedule - but I don’t intend to study much more for it, that’s for sure.
And to show that I can be just as insane as the next person: for the past hour, since Prometric called, I’ve been struggling NOT to take too seriously my usually-firm conviction that Everything Happens For A Reason. So I am trying to shake off the superstitious sense that maybe The Reason in this case is that I actually wasn’t ready for Step 2! I am mostly kidding when I say that but honestly, there is a teeny little piece of me that is buying into it. That piece of me is whispering, “See, now you’ll have time to get your bugs & drugs straight, and you can really get hyperkalemia down cold!” Ye gods. 
OK so the good news is, I will be able to listen to the Tour de France for every one of the remaining stages, so that’s something!
Hey Mary,
I had the same problem with the Fairfax-Merrifield Test Center. They wanted to reschedule me but I wouldn't budge. I just couldn't take anymore time with the test hanging over me. They finally accomodated me and happily, Step II is history. Now, I have Step III to get out of the way. The nice thing about this one is that I only need one more than a pass to get through this exam. I just need to schedule the thing. UVa gives us the two days to take the test. I will probably end up traveling to Richmond or Fairfax-Merrifield as Charlottesville does not have a test center.
While August is complicated, you are still pretty early.
Nat
Thanks, Nat! I have calmed down considerably since the initial curve ball. And talked to the coordinator for my August rotation, who was as accommodating and nice as he could be about my scheduling needs, so I am now scheduled for August 13 at Fairfax. (gives me a week to settle into the GW ER)
Remembering the technical difficulties you DID encounter doing Step 2 at Fairfax, I figured if they tell me they can’t take me, I am going to take them at their word and not push the issue! Lordy there sure were a lot of reasons why they couldn’t arrange things the way I wanted, though. Oh well, now I have the rest of today to do other stuff so that I am ready to go back to the beach next week.