I passed the CCC on my first try this past December. Of my 3 certifications, I thought it was the easiest of the exams. I finished in about 3.5 hours. Of course I was an overall more experienced coder by then. When I took the CCC I had been coding cardiology for 2.5 years.
How close were you to passing? It sounds like you know your stuff and that this was a case of test anxiety. One piece of advice to overcome test anxiety I can give is to remember that you can miss 45 questions and still pass. No one question is that vital to your success. Our electrophysiologist does his EP procedures at another hospital so I had never even read an EP op report much less coded one. We have 2 cardiologists who do peripherals but they don't do that many procedures since our vascular surgeons do most of them. There were about 30 questions that I had varying degrees of uncertainty about. 5 had really long op reports and I just didn't feel like reading them, so I skipped them.
What additional resource did you bring? I used "Navigator for Comprehensive Cardiology" from Coding Strategies. I also brought anatomy charts from Z-health Publications.
I think the biggest part of test anxiety is the uncertainty. Now that you know what to expect your next attempt should be more successful.
Good luck