The stats paper

woke up on 1045 in the morn of 30th november, not feeling too good. yup it wasn't till noon that i continued revising for my pharm stats paper.

drank one cup of coffee, which was suspected to be the cause of what happens below...

hmm after lunch, i managed to drag myself through the rest of inferential statistics. by the time i reached ANOVA was about 3pm.

however, my hands were clearly shaking. my teeth was chattering away. resting heart beat about 90 bpm. not good. in layman's terms, i was quite high. it lasted all the way to 4pm. by that time, i was blindly pushing my way through linear regression. last topic, but i didn't get much in.

4:20. showered. still, no use. still high. 4:40: asked my mum to fetch me to school. very high.

along the way, it worsened. i thought about how badly i'm gonna screw up this paper, especially when i've screwed up a paper the day before, real badly. i think, to study and know your stuff damn well, and get denied good grades is totally horrible.

shit. why did i drink that cup of coffee? but dunno lei. during the early days of the exam (pharm law), it really did good. i feel that i can really memorize a lot! but haiz. drugs work someday, kills you the other. caffeine is a drug.

anyway, along the way to school, it was evening and so there were damn lot of shadows along the AYE.. as we were speeding along the way it was like a moving picture of shadows, flickering around at high frequency. and it got worse.

and, my mum was the only person around, she has to drive the car.. so i took this jar of methyl salicylate ointment and usually what she did was to dab some on the region below my nostrils. hmm. a less painful method would be to dissolve the ointment in some hot water to form an infusion where the vapors are inhaled. damn painful. for those of you who have used stuff like muscle rub, u know how it feels. worse. i tried to rub the thing away with my hand, then ended up using the same hand to brush away the tears that were streaming down. result: some of it got into my eyes. agony, man.

almost went NUH. but for some reason i felt better and asked my mum to send me to KRH (where we had the exam) instead. reached there, asked the guys for advice and they told me to report it to the invilgilators. I told them i had epilepsy and "wasn't feeling too good, is there anything that can be done". How dangerous these words might sound. Immediately they sort of understood and Dr Bong beckoned me to a chair, telling me to "calm down" and "it's ok, relax". I asked them if they could quarentine me for the moment.

Then they let the rest of the pharm cohort in. Probably they was wondering, why was i sitting there and not looking up. Anyway, soon the HQ replied with that phone call that caught Prof Chan in-between his pre-exam speech. Said they were moving me to another place for students who are unwell. I guess, more or less they have some medical team standby there. Dr Bong was to be my sole invilgilator. How shiok is that, i don't know.

About 15 minutes later the NUS van came and off we went to LT23. Did my papers about 20 minutes later than the rest. Actually by this time my hand-shaking and teeth-chattering had stopped and i was feeling much better, thank god, otherwise i will really screw this paper. Did according to plan - did the structured questions first, then the mcqs. Luckily, the structured questions were copied directly from the tutorial. Can even remember some of the answers cos i tried it the night before. But the true/false questions were hard and mind-boggling and the thought of answering 60 of them is sheer torture.

In the end, i still managed to finish the paper. Even checked. But just very barely; sometimes for the questions which require some thinking, i just guessed. I guess that's a very good result in itself. And, i still managed to go out with yeelian, constance, hyeli, yuantai, victor, louis, jw, and grace for post-exam celebrations.

and this, i am grateful.