Whining can be therapeutic

Spring break has passed, and so has my first nervous breakdown of veterinary school. The details:

We had an anatomy test on March 4th that should not have been difficult... okay, it shouldn't have been overly difficult. It was the most God-awful anatomy test I have taken in my life (and I've taken more than a few). If you want to imagine what it was like - picture the thorax, with the heart still attached and in its normal position. The lung has been removed; all that is left of the its vessels are a few centimeters of vascular wall surrounding a gaping hole in the heart. The pulmonary vein was pinned.

Yeah. You can imagine similar pinnings for the rest of the exam.

I was already becoming demotivated but that was the straw that broke the camel's back (or the poor vet student's sanity). Not a good thing with a neuro test on Monday and a histo test on Thursday.

The bulk of my studying for neuro was that weekend. About 1pm on Saturday I started getting horrible stomach cramps, which elevated to a constant feeling of nausea on Sunday (I'm now thinking it was stress-related). That made studying super fun. Some allergy thing had also been flaring up and by this point I was sneezing fairly constantly - nothing, absolutely nothing I took stopped the sneezing save for diphenhydramine. So I popped one before I headed for class on Monday.

BIG. GIGANTOR. MISTAKE. Do not assume that if the medication has never made you drowsy before in your life that it will continue to never make you drowsy. (I did not have this epiphany until break). So I was trying not to fall asleep while I took the exam. We got the grades back Wednesday... a nice solid D, my second-lowest exam score thus far in veterinary school. So that was another hit to the motivation.

So all of this is boiling about and causing stress, which came to a head at about 9pm that Wednesday evening as I was studying for the histo exam. So I cried for a bit, which scared the crap out of my cat, then went right back to studying. But you know what? During my mini-breakdown, the only thing running through the back of my mind was cry it out and get through it, because this is exactly where you want to be.

I got some good advice over break - before you get out of bed in the morning, tell yourself that it is going to be a good day.

Current short-term goal: Study anatomy and immunology.
Current longer-term goal: Make it through the rest of the semester.