Chapter 109

Entry taken from OSCE saga part 2:

It is now 4:49am in the morning, I awoke and now can’t go back to sleep. I don’t like waking up in the middle of the night only to be hit with insomnia. Why? It’s not that I won’t have any energy for tomorrow. I don’t really need the energy if I’m being honest. I mean, I’m in limbo again and my last hope to not be in this limbo is likely going to come any day now. It’s been a few days since I’ve applied for the appeal and honestly, it kind of dawned on me now that this was a fruitless endeavor. I really should have just accepted my situation and moved on. Regardless, the main issue here is I just don’t like being awake this late because I just feel so alone. 

I thought I had done enough in my life to be okay with the guy in the reflection now but as it turns out, this struggle with that guy kind of comes on and off. I suppose there’s some merit in how I feel like I can at least handle him a bit better now but still, it’s sometimes just so annoying to see that guy. 

I keep thinking back on how all of this can be avoided if I just had less apathy for everything a few weeks ago but in truth, that is a crappy excuse. I should have just tried harder during the exam regardless of my motivations. Excuses or not, this entire thing is brought on by my own doing. 

Why do I keep shooting myself in the foot? Even when I have now been, at countless times, met with the circumstances of my own actions? Speaking of which…I knew this appeal process was bullsh*t, why did I still decide to go through with it? 

Entry over 

That entry was written a few days after I submitted my request for the appeal. Now, if the tone of that entry seemed a bit negative it was because it really was very negative. Furthermore, it was not very optimistic about the results of the appeal either. So why did I, along with quite a few of my colleagues, decide to do the appeal process nonetheless? Well, it all has to do with how the appeal process was marketed to us.

Picking up from where we left off, my fellow classmates who failed the OSCEs and myself got together and made a document that outlined everything that we thought was wrong with the examination. The list got longer and longer the more discussed and unfortunately, instead of seeing the entire act as a result of desperation, the more we wrote down, the more hope we got that we actually had a case. 

It wasn’t long before, as a collective, our group decided to ask to talk to someone from OEBC about the appeal process. It was then that we were introduced to The Man Peddling Hope (or MPH) for short. As you may imagine just by the moniker I gave him, he was not someone I liked. 

Now, before we go any further, I will have to admit that the story I’m about to tell is incredibly biased because of the circumstances involved. I mean, our group was desperate and dissatisfied with the entire OSCE process. A process that was the last barrier for most of us before entering into practice. Even though a lot of the notes I would eventually get are from a zoom call I had recorded when our group first met MPH, the context of the meeting will still inevitably be very biased. This disclaimer will be mentioned a few more times but that’s just to remind you that, the narrator here (me), is very biased.

With that said, how did things play out? Well. It’s simple. Our group collectively agreed on a time and then worked it out with MPH. Then, when the time came, we all hopped online at around the same time and spoke with MPH regarding our options. 

When MPH first hopped into our group chat, he instantly came off as a very carefree guy. He wasn’t rushing anything he told us and at his own pace, took us all through things we kind of all already knew. He recited, word for word, the information on the web. He told us how appeals for the OSCEs come in 4 different levels and depending on your situation, you may need to pay for various levels in order to get your point across. Each of the appeals cost $350 + tax to request and will usually take a few weeks for the results to come in. 

Then, MPH told us some information that we didn’t really know due to the vagueness of the website at the time. He told us that when we submitted our appeal, our examination results would be looked at by an adjudicator. After that, he said that should the adjudicator deem the situation valid, the appeal would be brought before a panel of optometrists where they would then look at our results and then work on a next step to overturn our results. MPH told us that if we had submitted an incident report form during the actual examination, our appeal would go straight to a panel of optometrists without going through the adjudicator at all. This last point is kind of important. In fact, when I revisited the video, I had to do a few double takes to make sure I heard that last part right. We’ll come back to it later. 

While the information wasn’t particularly riveting, it was, as I mentioned, something that wasn’t on the website. I think it was around here that the perception of MPH changed. Instead of a guy who just read off the website, MPH started to change into a guy who seemed like he knew more than he was letting on. 

Following that piece of information, it was our groups’ turn to chat. We all, of course, listed all our concerns to MPH and told him about the situation at hand. While doing this, more than just a few times, MPH wholeheartedly agreed with our arguments. After the points we mentioned, he even stated that it seemed like we all had a lot of convincing arguments to say. 

Hearing support from MPH at this point was, looking back, slightly too dangerous. If I had to describe how MPH was perceived at the end of the zoom meeting, I’d say that he seemed like he had power and some authority in the OEBC who also appeared like he was on our side. I mean, just the ease at which he continued talking about the appeal process after hearing our arguments made it seem like a slam dunk on the process. 

Because of this, after the zoom meeting with MPH, a lot of our group had our hopes up. Those of us who did submit incident report forms during the examination pretty much all decided to apply for the appeal. We saw hope. We saw a way out. With still a lot of uncertainty as to when the next OSCE was going to be, a majority of our group all submitted a request for the appeal and paid the $350 fee. 

It would be a few weeks that would pass by before we’d get results of the appeal. Then, surprise surprise, everyone got rejected.

Now, it’s here that I do have to re-address the bias. Even with the video of the zoom meeting, this entire ordeal now still remains very subjective. As I mentioned, we were desperate and worse still, the stagnation of COVID has started to become unbearable. Because of that, it’s hard to say if MPH took advantage of this or if maybe we just heard what we wanted to hear and speculated the rest out of a false sense of hope. Was MPH trying to sell us on doing the appeal? It’s hard to say. What I can say with objectivity however, is that MPH had been holding off on some information during the entire meeting. One crucial piece of information that was withheld? MPH was the adjudicator for our appeals. 

Imagine if you were shopping for a lawyer for disputing something small. After finding the lawyer, you sit down with him and lay down all your cards. You tell him the situation and what has happened and basically pour your heart out to him. He empathizes with you and tells you he understands the situation you’re in. You feel like he is definitely the lawyer you’re looking for to pull you out of this situation. You decide to sign him up to represent you. BUT THEN, the minute you pay him his fees, the lawyer turns around and pulls his mask to reveal that he was the judge all along. Worse still, he instantly rules against you. This is what played out in my mind. 

If I had to describe the issue a bit more in detail, it would be that there seemed to be conflict of interest among all the information that was not told to us. MPH has something to gain from our group. Since he was the adjudicator, when we file an appeal, our fees go to him. This was a fact MPH never mentioned once to us. Had we known that MPH himself was the adjudicator, I would’ve, at the very least, asked MPH a bit more about his background. 

The OSCE complaints our group made, especially with regards to the equipment stuff, sometimes mentions very specific occurrences involving optometric equipment. If MPH was the judge on those scenarios, I really wanted to know he at least knew something about the equipment. If I had known at the time that MPH is not an optometrist nor someone with a science background, I really don’t think I would have gone through with the appeal. 

Before we go any further, I know what you may be saying. None of this is against the law. MPH is not required to be an Optometrist to judge optometrists on their technical skills. MPH doesn’t really have to disclose that he is the adjudicator either. All of this is very scummy but it’s by no means illegal. To that I say you’re right. Despite the fact that MPH is in somewhat of a salesman capacity to some very desperate young adults who are looking for hope wherever they can get it, none of this is technically illegal. However, I at the very least don’t think MPH should lie. 

Remember how I had it on video that he said if we had filled out an incident report form that our appeals would skip past the adjudicator and go straight to the panel of optometrists? Well, turns out that was just a straight up lie. I can speak with personal experience that my incident report form during the examination didn’t allow me to skip MPH’s judgement. My appeal would never go before a panel of optometrists. No one’s appeal would. If you ask me today, I’d say that such a panel of optometrists doesn’t even exist. It was just a false advertisement. 

At the end of the day though, what could you really do? With the appeals now completely exhausted, MPH earned his fees and we were no better than where we started. I know, not a really happy story in the last few chapters was it? Moreso, it’s all very uninteresting in their own way too. Because of this boringness and toxicity I just spewed onto you, as the reader, in this chapter, I initially planned on just omitting all of it. However, I thought that if I don’t mention MPH now, I’d be skipping over a rather significant development in my life. 

I have personified my anxiety in the past as a demon. He showed up pretty prominently and pretty consistently way back when I was still in my undergraduate program and though I didn’t explicitly say it, he did contribute quite a lot to my need for soul searching in the last few years before COVID. I kind of always saw anxiety as the final boss to my story. When I defeated or tamed him, I would be more complete as a person. 

However, as it turns out, anxiety was just one monster in a sea of many. Among the pantheon, there was another demon called anger who never got center stage. The environment he was in didn’t allow him that much freedom in the past, but all that changed when MPH came into my life. With MPH, anger was about to get his time in the limelight.