Life as a Foreign-Trained Medical Graduate in Lagos. (Final part)

Hey y’all! Finally, the last post! If you’ve not been reading then you should probably check the last four posts. 🙂

So, they called the first hundred in. I was number 61. The nerves that day was unreal. I was finally called in. I got to the first station and the question was so basic like ‘take a gynaecological history on this woman’. I already practised the most common cases here like ‘Fibroids, Infertility, Uterine prolapse’ so I was pretty confident after station 1. I got to the next station and I was asked to do an abdominal examination. That went well too until I got to the third station where they asked me to take a history on a woman that came in with her 6 hour old newborn that had difficulty breathing and the woman was an actual illiterate. Jesus take the wheel. I didn’t even know where to start. I was asking this woman some random ass questions and she wasn’t even answering properly so I was like why me?

The examiners were just looking at me like are you actually stupid? They rang the bell and I moved to the next station still so worried about my last station. They asked me to do  a cardiovascular examination on a man. I had practiced this the night before so I was supposed to be confident but station 3 had me so confused that I kept second guessing my every move.  I finished and I wasn’t so confident over all. I felt like I could’ve done way better. They told us the results would be out the week after and honestly it was the longest four days of my life. I tried not to think of my performance and just hope for the best but every now and then the thought of failing would pop in my head and I’d freak out. I prayed every day. I talked to my friends to try to calm myself but it didn’t really work.

On Tuesday, the day has come o. I woke up nervous. I tried to pretend not to be too nervous. My friend told me they said they’d release the results around 4pm and by release I mean put our names on a website for the world to see. Oh Jesus.

4pm and still nothing. My phone vibrated and it was whatsapp message from my friend saying ‘ITS OUT O!’ I quickly requested for the link, opened it and looked for my number. THERE IT WAS! NUMBER 61. I SAW MY NAME YOU GUYS. I SHOUTED. My dad knew what was up immediately and was like yaaayyyy Congrats. Then I relaxed and obviously started looking for my friends numbers. Almost all of them made it! So very proud of every one of them!

Life lesson: Even when you feel like your best isn’t or wasn’t enough, all you gotta do is trust God. It’s okay to freak out once in  a while tho 😉

Hope yall are having a wonderful day and to the New Medical Graduates coming back home for the assessment examination! You can do it. Ezz nothing! 😉

I thought the hard part was over until I started looking for a job. You’d think a Doctor should be able to get a job easily considering how populated we are in Nigeria. Well, that’s not the case because I am still looking for a job. :/

• TOSIN