This morning was the last (big) hurdle of the semester for me aside from finals - discharging my second and final surgery patient. No more alarms going off in the dark, no more driving in to school with no one else on the road, no more wrangling dogs to get temperatures and heart rates when all I really want to do is sleep. It also means no more gorgeous PEI sunrises or wildlife sightings (Saturday morning I peeked out the window to see if it was raining and saw a skunk about a foot off the porch in my front yard! So thankful I didn't whip the door open and head on my merry way!) but I think I'll manage.

Both of my surgeries were successful and both dogs healed well. My suturing skills sky-rocketed almost immediately - probably because really live tissues are a lot easier to handle/suture than dead or fake stuff - and I felt a lot more confident in my own abilities the second time around. I got pretty nice reviews from the supervising surgeons (although I'm pretty sure they were relatively generic comments that probably most people got). There are still three more live labs left in the semester (one of which I'm anesthetist for, requiring another early morning and responsibility for a patient life) so I can't relax just yet, but I feel like the hardest part of the class is now over. Whew.

Our last midterm (#13, I believe - food animal) is tomorrow and then two glorious weeks of no exams and relatively little committment. I'm headed to Portland for the long weekend (Veteran's/Remebrance Day) to meet up with Danny, which should put me in a perfect mindset to finish out the semester strong. We have four weeks of classes left and two weeks of finals and then I can head home for three weeks of what can only be a wonderfully relieving Christmas break. Six weeks seems like a decent chunk of time, but with the way seems to get away from me up here, it won't seem like much.