Thesis, thesisnot, thesisit?

I'm currently sitting in my flat in Paisley, with a pile of papers, lab books, annotated drafts of my thesis, and an empty coffee cup. Tomorrow is D+1 day for my Doctorate. On Tuesday I shall make my way to Strathclyde University in order to sit down and defend my thesis as part of the oral examnination, or viva as they call it.

I'm pretty terrified over it as I have no way of gagueing how it will go. The examiners have only my thesis, and a few of the papers and proceedings i've published in order to assess my work. Which is fine except for the fact that I am not a good writer. Even taking a fresh look at my thesis I can see mistakes in tense, grammar and spelling. Can you fail a thesis for repeated mistakes with "in to"?

Then theres the issues of scientific content. I really wish I could find a way of knowing which parts they are going to quiz me on. Will it be the dental disease chapter (as they are engineers, and this is potentially an unknown for them) or will it be the lengthy maths of the miniature optics simulations (where OpenOffice excelled itself in the utter-bastard stakes by renumbering the equations wrongly during pdf export). Perhaps a lack of error bars in one little graph will take up three hours of discussion on specitivities and sensitivities?

All in all, I feel like I have a fight on my hands. I really wish that the feelings of confidence i get where I look at my thesis and think, yeah, i've done enough, would last more than an hour.

I used to think that my driving test would be the scariest, and most stressful exam I'd ever sit, but it doesn't even come close to this.