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Sunday, June 21, 2009

I'm so bored. Why everyone is having holidays already while I still have three more papers to go? FML. Can Thursday arrive faster? Why do the exams have to drag over two weeks when I can finish them in one week's time? It's such a torture to read the stuffs over and over and over again and yet still can't get them into the brain. 3 gone and 3 more to go. I'm only halfway through.

Let me tell you how did I go for my oral exam. So I had my oral counseling exam on the 17th. It was on the 11.15am. One day before it, I was revising and practicing with my friends the whole day and at night I was so nervous, I practically went insane, hoping tomorrow never comes. Such drama. I know, but I have never been so nervous for any exams before! Oral always hit me hard. I'm so afraid to miss out any point, because it was stated that if any essential criteria is missed, then we will fail the whole section. Scary much? That's why we were all so freaked out. No one wants to fail the exam.

On the morning before heading off to uni, my heart was pounding so fast due to the sympathetic stimulation I've got. I'm sure the heart nearly jumped out and I have to keep calming myself down. The next thing I know, I've already been quarantined in the waiting room and I was almost the last batch of students to go in for the exam. So I did some last minute revising and practicing and then around 1am I was called into the room.

The moment I stepped into the room, I was so nervous when the examiner handed me the OTC scenario. When the perusal time began, I started scrabbling down all the essential questions to be asked and looked up the pharmacy bible for the correct medicine to recommend to. The case was about a man working in the law firm coming into the pharmacy for his headache. The first thing that came to my mind was...ok, headache is pain, pain then use NSAID, and I happily looked up all the dosage and info for ibuprofen and jot them down. When the 5 minutes perusal was over, I began with 'Hi, I'm the pharmacist on duty today, how can I help you?' and it goes on. Everything went well but I was so careless I did not pick up one of the condition that the man is having. So I just proceeded with recommending the medication. 'Because you're just having a tension headache, I'll recommend you some ibuprofen.' The moment I said 'ibuprofen', the examiner went 'Oh, I should have told you this earlier. I have gastric pain and my doctor advised me not to take aspirin or any forms of that.' Seriously, that moment I went blank and kept regretting for not picking up this condition earlier when I asked about his past medical condition. **Thank godness the examiner was good to let me know of it, but I guessed I lost a lot of communication marks. I learnt from other friends that some examiner just let the student go with ibuprofen without interfering them, which I think wrong recommendation of medication will kill the patient, and in our case, maybe fail the exam.** So I quickly excused myself and search for paracetamol (panadol). 'Here I'll get you some paracetamol, is that okay?' and the examiner gave a thumb up for me. Then I proceeded with counseling on how to take the medication and I was saying 'take 0.5-1g every 4-6 hours and the maximum dose is 4g.' in which the examiner asked 'so what does that mean?' *omg in my mind I was thinking...oh shit how many tablets are there?* Then, I panicked and stunned there for few seconds trying to work out how many tablets are there. Simple maths failed me during this panic moment and I took so long to finally say 'ok, so take 1-2 tablets every 4-6 hours, not more than 8 tablets daily' and again the examiner smiled brightly at me and gave me a thumb up and I silently sighed a relief. 5 minutes of OTC section ended when the buzzer went off.

The examiner then handed me a prescription scenario. It was a woman coming in to get temazepam. During the 5 minutes perusal time, I looked up temazepam and wrote down the counseling points and all and I began with the same old introduction line. We had 10 minutes for this section and I think I was speaking a bit too fast that I still have like 4 minutes left when I finished the whole section. I also did some silly mistakes here. When I finished taking the patient history, I proceeded with counseling and telling the patient how to take the medication and what are the side effects. 'So, Miss Betty, this is your medication. It works really well in helping you to sleep. Just take one tablet at night when NECESSARY. There are some common side effects that you have to know when you are on this medication and these include some drowsiness and oversedation. So you might get a hangover the next morning, just be careful about that and avoid operating machinery. You will also develop tolerance, dependence and withdrawal symptoms, so do not stop taking this medication suddenly.' To which the examiner showed me a confused face and asked 'but I'm only taking this when NECESSARY. If I take this for two days and I stop taking on the third night, is that considered stopping suddenly?' *OMG I got stunned again and I don't know how to answer her and I was trying so hard to find explainations to her but to no avail.* 'emmmmmm (I remembered I dragged this for very long), yea Miss Betty, just keep in mind not to stop taking it suddenly because of the withdrawal syndrome but for your case I think it's just alright' !!!!!! I seriously don't know what was I saying and I saw the confused face of the examiner and my heart was beating even faster. I think the examiner just let go with this issue and I continued advising her on the sleep hygiene to be practiced.

I was the fastest to finish this section in the whole room with a total of 3 students. Then I just took off the recorder on my neck and placed it on the table and smiled at the examiner. The examiner wrote something on the marking sheet which I can't see and then we still have plenty of time before the buzzer went off and I can't leave the room just yet. So the examiner was striking up a casual conversation with me by commenting that she liked my keychain on my pencil case and we proceeded to chat about Malaysia...haha as she asked me where was I before coming to Brisbane. I think our conversation was being recorded in the recorder as she did not switch off the recorder when I placed it on the table. XD.

That is how I went with the oral. I just hope I did not screwed up too much with the slowness in telling the patient the correct number of tablets and the wrong choice of medication to be recommended in the first place for OTC section and the contradictory and possibly irrelevant information of stopping the medication abruptly in the prescription station. I just want a pass for the oral. Pretty pleaseeeee....

okay time to get back to revising for tomorrow's paper, the dumbest paper of all.

.::chanelz::. hugged you at 2:31 PM;Y

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