Chapter 118

I’ve been off of social media for about a month now. It means I haven’t really kept up with messages by the facebook group made of those who failed the OSCEs. Now that I finished my American boards however, I had time to catch up to speed on things. Everyone was still angry and frustrated. You’d think that after one hit of COVID that the guys running the Canadian Board Exams would hustle a bit and get to working on a much more organized test the next time around. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. The next Canadian OSCE test, which was initially set to be done on May 16, 2021 was now changed to sometime in July. Somehow, the second exam being held during COVID was even more troublesome than the first. The written Canadian exam was luckily not delayed and still set for around April 22, 2021.

While the morale for everyone in the chat was low, I was coming off of a high. I had just finished the NBEO part 1 and proved myself capable. While some of those in the facebook group had sort of gotten very depressed and docile, I was feeling incredibly capable and yearning for the next thing. It wasn’t hard to figure out what to do. I had two initiatives. The first was to get a job. The Canadian OSCEs were around $3,000 a test and I was running out of money from all my spending on the NBEO. The second was to find a way to practice my optometry practical skills.

My NBEO part 1, which ended on January 27th, 2021, basically secured any difficulty with future encounters needing optometry knowledge. I was now better equipped for the Canadian written exam in April than I ever was and whatever knowledge of clinical skills I needed for the OSCEs was now just an afterthought. However, between now and July when the practical exam would start, that was still a good 6 months of no access to any optometry equipment. While the knowledge based things were not an issue, the practical portion of the practical exam was a problem. If I didn’t do any clinical skill testing during that time, I would be rusty and that was not a recipe for passing an exam for practical skills. 

With both the need of a job and access to optometry equipment in mind, I decided to call clinic A. Clinic A was the clinic where I did my volunteering and got the reference to apply into the optometry program with. At this point in time, I had been on and off again during school summer terms for almost a decade. After emailing a few contacts from the clinic, the person who got back to me was the office manager. While she doesn’t come up enough in my story to really talk too much about, I can honestly say she is one of the unsung heroes of my life. 

She was one of the kindest people I knew. Not only was she the one who hired me all those years ago, she was always supportive of me during my time at Clinic A. She was a manager and that meant we had limited interaction but whenever we did have interaction, she made it count. When I started again, the office manager, the other optometrists working and I chatted about the current situation. They offered me help and I figured letting them know about my current situation was only fair. They were genuinely interested. I mean, more than 10 future optometrists in a class of 90 not getting into practice right away? That’s over 10% of Canada’s 2020 incoming optometrists! 

Just like the office manager, the other doctors there who were and still are my career mentors, were also kind. I needed that. Their kind words reminded me of something that I almost forgot. The bureaucracy of optometry was not the essence of it. The job was to help people. Sure, it was usually under the guise of helping someone see better but the essence of the task was still to help. 

With a job and a way to practice my clinical skills. I was all set up. I worked 5 days a week as a staffer at Clinic A and did whatever needed doing. Since I was familiar with every aspect of the clinic at this point, that meant I was versatile. There was always something for me to do and something around the clinic I could make better. Though I was just earning minimum wage, I felt comfortable in my work.

In the hours after the clinic shut down, I would stay behind and use the optometry rooms’ slit lamps and phoropters to keep up to date on my clinical skills. Fortunately for me, nothing felt forgotten. The clinical skills for gonioscopy, tonometry or BIO, all of which are components of the OSCEs, were still skills I was proficient in. I hoped that was enough. But as I drilled the skills again and again, I recalled how during the last OSCEs, it wasn’t the performance of the skills that bothered the participants. It was the equipment. How do you prepare for that? 

In truth, I don’t think you can. However, I had to do something about this. So, with this in mind, I decided to ask a few friends of mine in the facebook group to form a new study group. I made a discord where we would all join in once a week to go over optometry cases as well as talk about strategies to pass the OSCEs. It was a good idea to run cases. It was an even better idea to run OSCEs cases while having the expectation that something may go wrong during the station. Our group thought of more than just the OSCEs station requirements. We also thought about how to write incident report forms and how to still perform at the station when equipment fails. There was no real way to account for equipment failure but I think this was better than nothing. 

Speaking of OSCEs, I found myself with enough money to pay it around a month after starting to work at Clinic A. With the funds in my possession, I registered for the next OSCEs and right after I completed the costly transaction, I got an email. I thought it would be the email confirming my registration but it wasn’t. It was from NBEO. They had finished grading my exam.

The part 1 results were in.