Chapter 107

During 2016-2020, when I was in Optometry school, there was talk about completely eliminating the OEBC and just making all future Canadians do the American NBEO exam to get our licenses. When I was a student, I didn’t understand the sentiment nor reasoning behind this. Why betray one of the domestic systems in play? Now I understand it. It all has to do with how poorly the entire system was set up. It was very strict yet disorganized as hell. 

When you lose hope in a system that has been in play for decades. Often you’ll find yourself doubting. If something has been around for so long, surely it must have merit right? If it wasn’t good, how has it stood the test of time? Was I going crazy? Was the regulatory bodies of my profession really that bad? Had my graduation and the timing of Hong Kong and COVID happening back to back caused me to just see the world in an uncommon light? 

Luckily, there’s an easy way to find out if you’re crazy or not. If you’re alone in a sentiment, it could very well be that you are biased. However, if you were joined by a group of people. Maybe there’s some truth in your views. They say misery loves company and though I would never wish what was about to happen to me on my worst enemy, I can’t say that I didn’t benefit from the pack mentality I was about to experience. 

Let’s pick up the story again where we left off. I had graduated rather unceremoniously and had done the licensing examination though rather carelessly. I was not optimistic about the result since I never really treated it that seriously when preparing. The caring part of it all kicked in only after the exam was done and because of the timing of it all, while awaiting for the results of the exams, I started to really beat myself up. 

Passage taken from OSCE Saga part 1:

Entry begins

It’s now 3am again and I can’t sleep. The stress dreams I’ve been experiencing for the past few days also don’t really help with the situation either. Did I ever think about how my body changes with stress? Or with anxiety? Is it different for other people? I suppose it depends on who you are. Stress has been leading into small panic attacks lately. I hate those. It’s short lived, sure, but boy do they ruin your day.

When it begins, your eyes glance away from their natural center, as if to cower away from the reality of the situation. Then your heart’s pounding sounds reveal itself from the background. Then, suddenly you’re consciously breathing and hit with a sense of impending doom. 

All of this happens for an instant but it really can feel like an eternity. In those next few moments, you are overwhelmed and your thoughts grow more and more dark. Every fiber of your being is filled with guilt and regret. You start thinking about ways to stop the feeling. You are conscious but not so in control. The train of thought can not be steered. We can not simply choose to forget nor look away. Your brain forces a focus on something you really don’t want to think about and all of this happens while the physical body on the outside remains the same. 

I remember the first time that happened. It was when I failed the first time. I remember the second time it happened too. It was when I failed the second time. The fact that it had happened once before didn’t really help. I’m not sure if this is one of those “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger things”. I think it’s one of those accumulation of scars kind of things. So what will happen if I fail again? 

I hope I don’t fall into that mindscape of despair again. I remember all of that and how horrible it felt. Damn it was hard to pull myself out of that hole. My only advantage if I do fail again is that at the very least now I know how my body would react to panic that comes from news like that. If I do fail, I hope that I will at least be able to control that feeling a bit better this time. I got to remember that this isn’t the end of the world. I have to remember that you still have to keep going.

Moving forwards is the best way to escape the hole. 

Entry Over.

While stressing about the results of the test, my head kept playing scenes of the past like a guilty verdict. If only you took things more seriously. If only you tried harder. If only, if only, if only. This all really messes with your head. Add this to the fact that I am no stranger to failure and now you’ve got a second voice scolding me for why I didn’t learn my lesson despite having gone through it all already before. 

Here’s the thing though. This time, there was something VERY different from the previous failures I’ve had in the past. While I was stressing about how the results would look, a lot of friends in my class who had taken the test with me also were stressing. Sure, they were only stressing about the OSCE half and I was stressing about both the written and the OSCE but we had enough in common that I kind of just fit in with the group. That’s right. For the first time, I was not the only one stressing out about exam results.

It was weird to see others struggle in the way that I was. Online chat groups were our main source of communication at this stage of COVID and people were talking about how sometimes, eating felt weird since there was this overarching sense of impending doom. Then there was talk of a lack of sleep and yup, that sounds about right. 

As much as I enjoyed the “misery loving company” bits of all of this, I sort of expected that for most of my class that they would recover after the results came in and they would all pass. I sort of knew for certain I wasn’t going to make it but for the rest of them? I tend to hold my classmates in really high regard and I don’t think they would actually find themselves siding with me after the result’s release. I was damaged goods. Broken in motivation and battling apathy from a long and tenuous relationship with all of the administrative sides of Optometry at this point. For my classmates though? They hadn’t been through the trenches of Hong Kong. Surely they must have at least a little better of an outlook? Right? 

During all the online talks, I felt like I got enough out of the group mentality part of it all. I was feeling better knowing I wasn’t the only stressing out. Add this to the fact that sometimes you do get a little stronger mentally after surviving a fail or two and I soon found myself coping with the fact that I will likely fail the two exams pretty nicely. Because of this, I found myself counseling some friends of mine who thought that for sure they’d failed. All in all, by the time when the results of the examinations were supposed to come around, I felt like I had made a lot of new connections with friends just from the chats about anxiety. But…that’s kind of where I hoped it would stop. I didn’t want anyone to join me in the next bit where you’d have to pick yourself up from the ground after failing. That was not a fun time. I would rather suffer alone if it meant less people felt what I was about to experience. 

But then…the results came back. And as it turns out, I was not going to be alone after all.

I got privy to the results release when I saw a particular Facebook post on our class page. Someone had decided to share the results of their OSCE exam and how they failed. I found this incredibly surprising. It took me a long time to be okay with failure when I first failed and here was this classmate of mine, posting about her results openly the day the results came out. How brave was that? I couldn’t pull that off. 

What makes the post even braver was the fact that Canadians don’t fail the OSCEs. If you’ll recall, I did mention previously that the Canadian board exam pass rates were sometimes really close to 100%. So in that atmosphere of a longstanding tradition where no one fails, my classmate still decided to share her failure and put it all out there. Even to this day, I often think back on that moment and try to remind myself that there are brave souls in the world. 

In the same post, my classmate decided to see if anyone else was in the same situation and sought to rally some of us together and figure out a way to handle it all together. After seeing this, I checked my scores and sure enough, I didn’t make it. But seeing her post and riding the courage from her decision to come forward, I commented on her post outing myself too. If she isn’t ashamed, why should I be? I mean, I was a veteran at failing now. I should be totally fine with everything. 

Aside from the classmate who posted the initial post and myself, there were actually quite a lot of people who exposed their own scores in the comments. That’s when it dawned on me that something didn’t add up. I’ve been paying attention to the analytics posted by the Canadian OEBC, the guys behind the licensing exams, and knowing the rates for failing them were so low, the number of my classmates who seemingly failed was too high. There were too many of us. 

The OSCE’s analytics section online is just a list with some past trends and numbers on it. The numbers I paid attention to most were the pass rates and failure rates. These numbers mainly just tell you how many Canadian students passed their exam and how many internationals passed theirs. The Canadians, consisting almost entirely of the Waterloo students and Montreal students, have always had an over 92-95% pass rate prior to 2020. This publically available piece of information meant that, roughly, in a class of 90 every year, there should only be 4 or 5 people. Our class though? Just from the post alone you can count a good 13 people. 

This was almost triple the statistic we had in the past. The number was too high. 

What was going on here? 

I kept thinking about this as I tried to consult some of my classmates who failed. I was torn up, yes, but I was handling it rather well. I guess all the failures in my past finally caught up to me and taught me at least some resilience. A part of me knew that, yeah, this sucks, but I know we have the ability to overcome this. Unlike my previous academic failures, this was a licensing test fail. You get three tries and multiple tries throughout the year (which should be the case even if COVID was in play). 

Despite how I was handling it, I can’t say I was liking what I saw. I saw my fellow classmates have meltdowns of their own and cope through all of the issues related to something like this and it reminded me of how I felt back then. There are certain events that, once it occurs, hits you with a level of pain that you wouldn’t wish on anyone. For me, this was one of those times, during the entirety of seeing my fellow classmates try their best to cope, I never got any schadenfreude. The situation just kind of sucks.