Surviving the First Semester of Med School

I survived!!! It is such a great feeling right now to be done with my first semester of medical school! I thought sometimes that it would never end and honestly really wanted to just quit at times-—it seemed to be a much easier option until I stopped to think of where that would leave me. My last few weeks consisted almost entirely of studying. I would wake up at eight in the morning at the latest and quickly get ready and drive to school. I would eat lunch and dinner here (I even started bringing my groceries here to school and not to my apartment—pathetic, I know). I wouldn't get home generally until midnight. Now, there were some breaks in the day for lunch. In the evening I would go running at the gym with my friend Jules from my class. Those treadmills have seen all my stress and frustration! Another little break for dinner and then back to studying.

All this studying led up to this week—exam week. We had both histology and gross lab practicals on Monday, gross and embryo written on Tuesday, an incredibly difficult histo written on Wednesday, and triple jump yesterday and today. Triple jump is a case that you have to do by yourself.

So now it's time to start my nice holiday vacation with some fun with my friends here and then off to visit family with my mom. I've also included a picture of my class and me in the gross lab. We all laughed at how horrible we look—pale skin and sunken eyes with bags under them showing all
of our exhaustion from too much stress and too much studying! The good thing about this step, though, is that we all got to know each other a lot better, and I feel like our class really came together.