100 Things Not To Do Before You Die

I have just booked a room-with-a-view (of the nearby bustling motorway) in one of England's many suicidal, peri-metropolitan commuter towns. There, in the dark, dreary and deafeningly silent confines of my loney lodgings, I shall count down the seconds of Friday night until the appointed time of 'the Great Exam'. My only companion through those long, painful hours - 'till at long last the Saturday sun burns up the hazy gloom of an autumnal morning and I make my way to the crumbling District General - will be this ever-present, expanding sense of dread that gnaws at my entrails like a pack of hungry rats. Well, that and a litre bottle of cheap gin.

Wish me luck.

The Mother of all Exams

De profundis clamavi ad te Domine!

Yes, well, if it's good enough for Oscar Wilde, then it's good enough for me too. Admittedly I might not be locked up in Reading Gaol doing hard labour for eyeing up some street urchin on the Tottenham Court Road, but I am nonetheless in the most uneviable of predicaments.

I am revising for PACES.

PACES is the third and final part of the post-graduate medical examination that all (British) physcians must pass in order to progress from a senior house officer to a registrar and beyond. Its name may well be an acronym derived from the rather benign-sounding Practical Assessment of Clinical Examination Skills, but the creature itself is anything but harmless.

Essentially it involves a serious of stations in which is perched some hideous, freak-of-nature patient with their nauseating pathologies shamelessly on show for all the world to see. You enter and examine the patient against the clock with the aim of correctly identifying what is wrong with them. Unfortunately, the whole proceeding is watched over with a hawk-like keeness by some decrepid old mummy of a consultant who has been specially dug up for the occaision. Should your examination not conform to their own idiosyncratic expectations, then beware: theirs is the power to pass or fail as the whim pleases. But not before the grilling, naturally. You present; they pounce: "so, aortic regurgitation, you think? And what, pray tell, are the 14 eponymous signs of severe aortic regurgitation? And what vanishingly-rare association of no clinical significance is there between aortic regurgitation and rectal bleeding?" Er. Er...

Best of all you get to pay £480 for the priviledge of sitting it. And that's not even to mention the vast sums of blutgeld demanded by those parasitic vultures who organise the revision courses or produce those obligatory books, without which can result only failure (or so we are told). At anywhere between $500 to £1500 a course and £30 to £70 a book, pearls of wisdom, it would seem, do not come cheap these days. In fact, PACES is a veritable gold-mine for everybody but the people sitting the bastard.

There are presently 21 days left until the my own big day. It's so comforting to know that I am just beginning a week of nights: I'm sure that'll help the revision no end!