Life as a Foreign-Trained Medical Graduate in Lagos (Part 4)

Hey everyone! I hope you’ve been able to catch up with the first 3 parts.  Problem is, i don’t like extremely long posts so i decided to turn it into a four post something. LOL

If you haven’t read the first three parts. You can read them here , here, and here.

The day of the exam, I couldn’t sleep properly. I mean what is sleep really? I had like three hours of sleep, showered and left my house. I wanted to get there early because Lagos traffic was insane at the time and I wasn’t gonna let Lagos traffic win! We were to get there 8am. I was there 7am.  I know my own was a bit too much. You can’t blame me tho. We were given mdcn numbers weeks before the exam and were instructed to enter the hall according to our numbers. They searched us and made sure we went into the exam hall with just our writing/shading materials. I was so nervous but I calmed down while waiting for like two hours before the exam actually started. Smh. We got sitted around 9 and the exam officially started around 10.

They had three different exam papers (same questions) to avoid cheating as if anyone was going to risk cheating and ruining their life. I got paper 1. I took a deep breath and started the exam which was multiple choice questions; pick the best answer. We were instructed on how to shade our numbers and write our numbers on every page of the question paper (Still not sure why). First 5 questions in, I was like ‘odikwa serious!’

‘WRONG ANSWERS WOULD BE PENALIZED’ was written boldly in front of the question paper. I don’t and would never understand the need for negative marking which basically means for every wrong answer you shade, some marks will be deducted from your total score. Stress.com. Now you can’t even guess answers. You are either very sure like 100% sure or not. I left a bunch of numbers blank after I was sure the ones I did know were more than half of the entire thing.  We finished around past 12 and were asked to report back at 1pm for the next exam which was ‘OSPE’ – Meaning they project a picture for 3-5 minutes and then you’re given about 14 true or false questions to answer based on that picture. They projected 18 pictures I think.

The part they forgot to mention was that they won’t even give us extra time even if it was five minutes after the entire thing to go through our answers.  I didn’t finish and that was when the panic attacks started. I finished late and when I got home everyone was waiting to hear how my day went. I was more concerned about day two because I know I may or may not have fucked up in OSPE. Day 2 was OSCE so I practiced some physical exams on my parents. Tbh, i practiced the history taking so much that I was taking a focused history in my sleep. We had four stations, five minutes for each station. (two history taking (Peds and Obgyn) and two physical examinations (Surgery & Medicine). Two examiners per station watching your every move.

Stay tuned for the last and final part!!

Thank you for taking time out to read these posts! 🙂

• TOSIN