Yesterday marked the completion of Day 2 of my New York State Wet Lab experience. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown all the way up until the exam. I checked my admission ticket at least 97 times and checked and re-checked my weights, calculator, pencils, and pens every five minutes until they opened the door to the lab in the basement of the college.

The exam was scheduled for 8:00am and I arrived promptly at 6:50am just to make sure I would be there on time. I had heard from other students and from one of the proctors that if you wanted to be in the nicer of the two available labs you had to be there early so I made sure to be the first one there. Right before they let us in I felt like I could have thrown up I was so nervous.

After I was admitted into the testing room, I listened to them spout out a bunch of their pre-test jargon that nobody really hears and when the exam was passed out I felt like I was on the verge of a mental breakdown.

The first thing I did was the I.V. calculations. I did them almost nine times. I calculated my drip rates and infusion rates over and over and over until I was SURE that they were right. I had heard of a few people failing from that kind of error. I spent probably the entire first hour making sure the I.V. calculations were right. Let’s hope I didn’t miss anything stupid!

When I had to go into the I.V. room to actually make the bag, I did fine up until the proctor hit the timer and when trying to pull back air on the first syringe I inadvertently blocked the air flow to the plunger. I paused for about a solid minute thinking about what I had done and if I thought the proctor noticed. I decided I didn’t want that thought to haunt me for the next 6-8 weeks so I asked for a re-do which lost me 5 points on the I.V. product. I was so upset with myself. At one point during the second try, my hand was shaking so bad that the needle jumped out of my hand! I was lucky enough to catch it without compromising the sterility of the product. With three minutes to spare, I was done!

The remaining two products were a hydrocortisone/calamine/petrolatum ointement and a tamiflu suspension. The suspension was tricky because they didn’t give you the dose needed. The prescription just said it was for an 8kg child and was to be dosed for post-exposure prophylaxis. Luckily I had made several of these at the CVS that I work at and knew the correct dose, but I spoke to a few who didn’t. That was a lot trickier than I suspected it would be.

The ointment was fairly easy. There was an oddly worded question that implied two different answers that could be correct and from the people I spoke to the answers were split both ways. It will be interesting to see how they grade that question.

Anyway, now I just have to wait and see if I passed or not!

6-8 weeks of torture…

Related posts:

1. NYS Pharmacy Wet Lab Part 1