Chapter 1
2:00 AM
Q-Bank Practice Test #42
Days til USMLE: 56
Once upon a time there were three children with eating disorders.
One of them chewed his own regurgitant from infancy onward; the second stopped eating with her family when she became a teenager, and complained of being overweight despite a BMI below 17 percent; and the third, an otherwise successful college student, ate chalk. Which of these patients has the best prognosis of complete recovery?
A. The infant, because rumination disorder often results from neglect
B. The college student, because pica inversely correlates with level of education
C. The teenager, because now that the Grlock Imperium have taken over society prefers larger women and anorexia’s dead
D. I am so tired C looks like a legitimate possibility. Will our Grlock Overlords allow us to rest, or is the obsessive pressure to succeed something inside ourselves that we can never escape?
Your selection of a non-traditional response has been noted. Out of the three children in the previous question, which is most likely to correctly answer the following multiple choice question:
Find X.
(X-2)(X+3)=3x+45
A. 1+5(square root of 2i), and 1-5(square root of 2i)
B. I totally googled that and got A
C. The teenager, because the infant can’t solve polynomials, and the college student has forgotten how
D. I have forgotten how to solve for X, just as I’ve forgotten the names of my siblings, my cousins’ faces, and the color of the sky when summer’s in my heart and not just outside.
Do you need to drop out of school? Are you suffering from psychosis? Are you afraid of losing your scholarship?
A. So many questions at once! What happened to my exam?
B. I demand a Turing Test. I don’t believe you’re really a computer.
C. What will happen to me if I say yes? Will I lose the chance to help the people who need me the most? Will you judge me, and see me as weak? If I say no, will Ienjoy joining the profession where men like me are 70 percent more likely to kill themselves than other professions? Will I become one of the 400 who die this year?
D. I’m not going down without a fight.
End Exam?
Yes
No
Closing exam in 5…4…3…
No.
2…1…
Next Question.
I’m not going down without a fight.
*
I hope you’ve liked this non-traditional flash fiction.
It’s based on real statistics you might not be aware of, in the hopes that maybe you’ll research the suicide problem in American medical schools, or just consider stepping into someone else’s f’d-up suffering head for a moment.
Thanks for reading! For other f’d up little stories, click here.
