DHW – “Really, it started out as just honest enthusiasm,” says recently promoted MS3 Dane O’Broughlaine. “Over the material, over the technology – it was all so fascinating then. Pretty soon, it was fueled by pure dread.”
O’Broughlaine, once widely recognized for his aptitude as an ARS respondent, now admits to affecting on several occasions approving, congratulatory gestures following the revelation of answers to ARS questions after only moments before submitting an incorrect response.
“I’d get an answer wrong, and maybe I’d nod a little, you know, maybe whisper, yes,” continues O’Broughlaine. “More often than not, it was a farce.”
“Foundations II, that’s when things got really heavy for me.” O’Broughlaine recalls feeling overwhelmed by the weight of expectations he had established among peers in his general vicinity in Hughes auditorium by consistently nodding after the answers to Foundations I ARS questions were revealed, as if discrete revelations of scientific insight had concurrently revealed for himself and for those around him the workings of his astonishing intellect.
“I mean, once I nodded after egregiously misunderstanding the Lifestyle Medicine ARS question where we calculated METs, or whatever, there was really no going back.”
Eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance, O’Broughlaine appears weathered, forlorn. “My actual response was off by several orders of magnitude, but there I was, nodding in the face of my error, as if METs were things one could actually calculate.”
Soon, to his classmates, O’Broughlaine was one who could be counted on to deliver a correct ARS response and ballast the class average, and to do so with a style and nonchalance made manifest by a gentle sway of the head, or a quietly ascendant whisper. Yet beneath his casual exterior was hidden profound turmoil.
“I mean, 64% of the class knew what she was getting at with that one?” Dissociative musings of this kind continue on for several minutes. “Are you kidding me? What does adnexal even mean? It was just too painful.”
Returning his clicker at the end of the M2 academic year was a salve for O’Broughlaine. “Oh, the force with which I used to indiscriminately mash those buttons…” His gaze returns briefly to the ambivalent grounds of his recollecting, and then regains its station in the present. “Returning that thing to its source freed me from it, and I feel cleansed.”
O’Broughlaine is looking forward to a fresh start on the wards. “And you know what else doesn’t hurt?” he asks, “Getting a cumulative 98% on the UWorld QBank.” He gives a gentle nod.