At long last, I have a post that is upbeat and not directly to do with school - woohoo!

One of the popular fall activities for vet students around here is "lambing" - you and a friend go to a local sheep producer's farm and stay overnight, helping the mama sheep that are due to give birth. I've wanted to go since I've been up here, but loving and needing sleep the way I do, I didn't want to go on a weeknight, get zero sleep and hop off to school the next day. When one of my friends asked if I wanted to go with her on Friday night, I jumped at the chance as I could come home and sleep afterwards!

We met at the farm around 7 that evening. The farmer and his wife - both really sweet, friendly people - gave us a quick run-down and then went off to their dinner. My friends and I (one other joined us) settled into the tiny little shack set up in the barn - heated with a TV and a U-shaped platform that we could lie down on. We got out a board game and ate our dinner. Then we made the rounds of the sheep (six pens with probably twenty or so sheep per pen). The evening progressed that way for a few hours. Around 3am, the first bag dropped and the three of us climbed into the pen to see if we could help.

Most sheep have twins or even triplets; surprisingly, most of them don't need a whole lot of help in the process. Unfortuantely, almost every lamb that night presented incorrectly! There were backwards babies, upside-down babies and babies trying to be born at the same time - ack. The first lamb I pulled had both its back legs pushed out behind it, instead of pointed outward like a little diver; I was able to get it positioned correctly pretty quickly, but it was still-born (likely not my fault, but still sad). The rest of the lambs survived their improper positioning ordeals, though we didn't get any sleep (literally!) all night.

It was a really fun and informative time for me. I always find that hands-on stuff works well for cementing things into my brain, and I really enjoyed getting the chance to reposition a couple of babies and help out their poor mamas. I was so thankful that I had two experienced friends with me to help with some of the trickier positioned lambs. I was also thankful that I had some previous sheep wrangling experience so I could help by holding the sheep that were giving birth and needed the help. All in all an exhausting but awesome night.

This next week is going to be hell week for me - radiology final on Monday, equine midterm on Wednesday and a surgery patient coming Monday afternoon. The good news is that after this week, it's all down-hill coasting until the end of the semester! If I can hang on this week, I can make it.

Not to sound melodramatic, but I'm at a bit of a cross-roads with this blog. The way the semester has been going, I feel drained, pessimistic, down-trodden, stressed, overwhelmed and rather apathetic at times. While the blog is mine and I have no obligation to keep things light-hearted and jovial at all times, I imagine that reading about how bummed I'm feeling post after post gets boring at best and irritating at worst. Watching the pageviews climb, I know that people do read my blog, and I guess I feel a sense of responsibility to those people to make the content at least something they want to come and read about. Right now, I envision people clicking on the blog, seeing my four hundred and thirty-fifth post about how stressed/etc I am right now, rolling their eyes and leaving.

But then I think of the blogs that I read, and that what makes them so compelling is that I feel like I can connect with the writer on some level. I don't care if they only ever post about one thing - if they can make it relevant and interesting, funny or emotional, I'm drawn to it and I don't ever feel like it was a waste of time to read.

So I went on the hunt through Google, searching "sample blog topics." What I came to discover was that "blogs" are seen mostly as a business-related thing, not as personal as I imagine them to be. "How I use Social Media!" or "Do It Yourself Projects!" are all well and good, but they are certainly not me. So I altered my search to "sample journal topics" and bam - I started to find the results I had been looking for! And then one of the prompts was "If you were a doctor, what kind of doctor would you be? (Veterinarian, children's doctor, etc)" and I abruptly lost interest because all my blog has really been about is about becoming a veterinarian and we all know how beaten to death that topic is right about now. So I got to thinking about what I would do if I weren't becoming a veterinarian and that was just depressing (buying a house, celebrating Thanksgiving with my family, starting a family, etc). Headed back in the wrong direction!

So I guess all I can do for now is continue along my merry way with this blog. I promise to try not to complain too much (some complaining will be inevitable...) and to include as much as I can about what I'm actually doing with my time. If I can make the effort to focus more on the events than the negativity I'm feeling, maybe I can feel less guilty about the quality of my posts.

The weekend is here at last. A shred of breathing room with no responsibilities - no surgery dog to check on three times a day, no exam on Monday (one on Tuesday, but that's one whole extra day!), no pressing errands to run. It's a wonderful feeling that has become so foreign this semester. I spent last night curled up under a blanket on the couch watching movies and worthless TV shows. I slept in this morning, read for a bit (I'm reading H.G Wells' Time Machine. While not usually one for "the classics", I've been enjoying this one), took another chunk out of the house cleaning that needs to be done and talked to Danny and my sister. It's a beautiful sunny autumn morning (er, afternoon) out there, and I think I'll go for a walk in the woods a bit later to clear my mind.

If I've learned anything in vet school, it's the importance of knowing yourself and your boundaries, achieving balance. Sure, we've all had to push ourselves farther than we ever have before - than we ever thought possible, probably - but even when you're stretching yourself to your limit to do your best, there is always a breaking point. I think of breaking points kind of like electric fencing in livestock pastures. When you go into that pasture, you're aware of where that hot wire is at all times. When you're further away from it, you aren't as concerned because eh, you have plenty of room. But when you're closer to it, you become acutely aware of just how far away you are, keeping one eye over your shoulder to prevent yourself from getting zapped. And this semester, instead of being out in the middle of the pasture, I'm up closer to the edges and I can almost feel my hair standing on end with anticipation.

So when I get a shadow of breathing room - like this weekend - it's like being able to move back to the center of the pasture, well away from the fence line. It's important to take those opportunities when they present themselves; no use in being stoic or you'll burn out.

I keep meaning to write a blog post about certain topics (my first surgery, my visit with my husband, something hipster about my personality test findings, a monthly resolution) but when I get home, I feel like I don't have a second to spare to write something so trivial as a post about what has already come and gone and doesn't require furious preparation.

My life has never been so hectic, so jam-packed with stuff. When I first got here, I thought to myself: man, vet school makes undergrad look like a piece of cake! And second year was tougher, but third year is like: man, third year makes first and second year combined look like a piece of cake! Funny how that works, huh?

If the only thing we had to worry about were more frequenty exams, I think I'd still be able to handle it. I thought I was bad with cramming the week of the exam last year. This year, I cram the night before the exam only. I feel as though I'm living on the edge of a dangerous precipice and that one day, I'll just say you know what, I'm not even going to study! (Not really. I can't imagine myself ever becoming that desperate. Yet.) Somehow my grades manage to get better, which is a wonderfully bad self-encouraging cycle for cramming.

But it isn't just exam after exam after exam. It's the quizzes, assignments, preparation for labs, SURGERY LAB (in caps because it's really that much worse) that make it all nearly unbearable. It's to the point that my brain will no longer allow my body to sleep in. Even when I've triple-checked my alarm for the next morning, even when I don't even have to be in that early, I'm instantly awake in the pre-dawn darkness wondering if it's time to get up. (And if you're telling yourself bah, I could never do that! I love to sleep in! Well so do I - I don't consider my weekend taken advantage of if I don't sleep past 11am.)

Surgery lab has eclipsed any other class by a long shot. It's like Secretariat consuming the measly competition in the amazing Youtube clips of his Triple Crown runs: unrelenting. Terrifying. Amazing. I spayed my first dog, a little Shih Tzu, last Thursday. Today, I was in charge of anesthetizing our cat to be spayed. I'm fortunate in that I've done a lot of the clinical stuff already, but it's still nerve-wracking in that particular environment when you see the clinician writing something on your grading sheet out of the corner of your eye. Not only are you in charge of the patient's life, you'd better be good at being in charge of it. And because I care about being good at it, I spend a lot of time preparing for the labs which is another time sink. And so it is that I have an exam tomorrow after lunch and I quite literally have not looked at my notes at all. Sigh.

So I'd better head off and get to peeking at them. I have so much more to share, so I guess you'll have to stay tuned!

"Don't say that you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteu, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein." -- H. Jackson Brown.

That quote always puts life into perspective for me. It's so easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information we have to learn, the endless list of things to do. I think that third year thus far has been the busiest I've been...ever - even more than the first two years, or wedding planning, or moving up to Canada for the first time. Even so, we all find a way to make it work.

This past week was probably the busiest of the semester (so far, at least). Diagnostic imaging exam, blood drawn for rabies titer, awards ceremony night, exotics final, surgery lab and all of its trimmings and equine health exam. I came home yesterday afternoon and just read my book for hours on end, nary a thought to productivity. We have a paper due and an exam (opthamology and some neuro) both on Tuesday, which I need to work on this weekend and I'm surgeon for our first live surgery lab this week. Danny gets into town Friday afternoon, though, for the long (Canadian) Thanksgiving weekend. Unfortunately I'm due in to school every day before 8am to get our patient's paperwork filled out (including the weekend and holiday) but as I've come to tell myself: it is what it is, no use fretting about it. I think I will be so happy to see Danny for a few days that I won't care anyway.