Midwife Mondays 120: NIPE Exam! Eek!

As I’ve mentioned in my last few posts, over the past few months we have been preparing for our NIPE exam. There was a huge amount to learn and I’d been trying to keep a good balance between enjoying Christmas and revising enough for the exam.

However, the Monday of the week of my exam was also New Years Eve…so we had do celebrate that first! We spent the night with friends; two of them got married earlier in 2018 and have just moved so offered to host new year at their house. We had a delicious chilli for dinner and I made my Gooey Chocolate Brownies for pudding (which we served slathered in Salted Caramel Sauce – yum!) and then we played games, laughed and drank until the clock struck 12. We sang Auld Lang Syne, and talked about our plans for the year ahead (which is a pretty big one with both M and I getting new jobs, and we are planning on moving and finding a house too!) We finally got back to M’s parents house and into bed about half 3 and slept like dead things until about midday – when the knowledge that there was bacon in the fridge was just too strong a call!

New Years day was spent mostly in our comfies, watching the telly and chatting with M’s parents; and his mum made a fab lamb roast to help us all get over our lingering hangovers!

On January 2nd we packed up the car for the last time (having been away since December 20th) and drove back to our little house and started the mammoth task of doing all the laundry. After an early night, it was back to the grindstone and getting myself sorted for my exam on the 4th.

I did feel reasonably well prepared for it after a lot of revision in December, but I still spent most of the rest of my time before the exam focussed on swotting up – writing notes, making myself read everything over and over, and even creating little quiz cards so I could force M to play the worst card game ever to test my knowledge!

Come Friday I was really nervous, but I got through it….I think….

It was quite an intense exam – it’s a spoken exam, where you have to look at the information in front of you and then roll off as much as you can remember about the particular conditions, their risk factors, incidences, treatments, how you recognise it, and so so much more – you’ve got a time limit to reel off as much as you can…scary and very intense.

I won’t get the results for a few weeks yet so I’ll keep you posted when I hear! Eek!

To read my last Midwife Mondays post, click here: