Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.

I took my Step II board exam today. Or rather, it took me. The test endured for a total of nine hours, with eight one-hour blocks of questions and an hour of break (O such overwhelming magnanimity!). During this time, I faced a continuous stream of questions designed not so much to test my knowledge as to break my will and leave me crestfallen. Despite taking four Vivarin (4*200mg of potent, alertness-inducing caffeine), my attention flagged after about two hours into the exam; in fact, to say that my attention flagged is somewhat of an understatement, as even Betsy Ross would envy what this exam created of my meager mental capacity. I struggled, battled, and sweet-talked my mind into finishing the interminable onslaught of questions, but by the end I was suffering even trying to read, much less to discern the proper management of yet another cause of second trimester bleeding (Ob-gyn, my least favorite subject, featured prominently on the exam, as it turned out). All in all, now that I have finished, my brain feels rather like a stadium urinal at the end of the seventh inning stretch: slightly stained, frothy, possessed of a singularly foul odor, and altogether used. Thankfully I have a few months to recover my wits before my surgical internship begins, and patients' lives actually depend upon my clinical acumen.

Well, since completing my exam I have ventured to the local riverboat casino and pissed away $120 into the Mississippi River, then returned home and voraciously consumed a glass of port wine and two bottles of McEwan's Scotch Ale (the best beer on the planet). Now I have about two hundred pages of reading to complete before my Health Administration class at 9:00am. So it goes.

*Kudos to the first person (amongst my substantial readership, ahem...) to recognize the source of the title of this post. No cheating with Google, though!
*Bonus points if you point out the novel in which "So it goes" was utilized as a concise means of recognizing the conclusion of a human life. (I have, of course, abused the term here).