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!