The Great Vanishing Act, and Betting on Babies

Paul Daniels could make elephants disappear from a crowded stage. David Blaine can levitate, and can make a playing card of your choice appear instantly in a bottle. Houdini could escape from a submerging casket whilst simultaneously removing 3 pairs of unbreakable handcuffs.
But they've got nothing on me. I can pull off the most incredible piece of magic that you'll ever have seen. I can make entire swathes of knowledge vanish in a microsecond. Months of learning, into thin air. The entire learning process of the third year removed from my head in one swift blow.
Psychiatry, gone. Paediatrics, gone. Primary health care, missing. Respiratory, AWOL. Gastroenterology, presumed dead. As for clinical skills like examining a patient, or showing them how to use inhalers, or even talking to them, I resemble a drunken Teletubby trying to hail a taxi. I'm not slick at it, that's for sure.
In case you hadn't guessed, exams are round the corner once again. The 8th consecutive year of exams for me, if you count pointless exercises like SATs and mocks, and the 6th year by any body's standards. It seems like yesterday when I got my AS Level results back, but it was the best part of 4 years ago. I've never been a big fan of exams (who is?), and that's partly due to my increasingly common tendency to forget things very quickly. I often find myself checking the ward board for a patient's name 5 seconds after I saw it. And to think at 6th Form I could remember an entire textbook for revision.
It doesn't help that the last few weeks before our slender revision period are taken up by some of the most intense attachments to date. Right now I'm on Obs+Gynae. I admit, I'm not your textbook "baby person", although I do occasionally catch myself mindlessly smiling at the baby when I should be listening to a doctor or watching the surgeons close up after a Cesarean.
In fact, babies have recently become interesting to me for another reason.
In theatre yesterday, as the newborn baby was being passed from the surgeon to the midwife after the Cesarean, I lent in and asked for clarification from the doctor, "a boy or a girl?".
"Boy", said the surgeon. I quietly pump my fist and mouth "Yes!".
It isn't my baby, of course not. I'm not related to it, and it's not even my patient, I'm only a student. But my friend and I have opened a book on the predicted sex of the baby, and I'd staked a quid on the lucky little thing having a Y chromosome. Easiest pound I ever earnt. And think of it like this, that child's first act in this world was to make me money. He is a winner, I can tell. Unfortunately, using that premise makes the girl that was delivered an hour later a loser, but I can live with that. Win some, lose some.