Countdown to The Boards

Yikes! The Neonatal Boards are Monday! And 1000 miles away! And Monday!!

I'm not nervous. Nope. It's only my perceived competence on the line. Never mind that the people I work with and for seem to think I do just fine.

And we don't get the results until July, despite the fact that we fill in all those stinkin' dots with stinkin' pencils so a REALLY FAST COMPUTER can read our answers and calculate who passes and who goes down in flames in an instant.

Maybe the people who feed the papers into the machine are r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w, like someone put a molasses hex on them.

I don't know that any more studying will help at this point. I'll keep reciting formulae I need to know like a mantra...sensitivity and specificity, PPV and NPV, A-a gradient, OI, GIR, MAP, physiologic dead space, volume of distribution...and if you know what all those are, you're probably a neonatologist. It's the metabolic disorders that are eating me alive - there's no rhyme or reason to their names, so it's very hard to get a handle on them. I mean, some are named after people (Hurler syndrome), others after the missing enzyme (ornithine transcarbamoylase deficiency), and still others for the effect or symptom (maple syrup urine disease - and no, you don't piss maple syrup; it just smells like you do). Dagnabbit, can't we standardize these puppies?!?!

I'm going to bed.