I swear I'm still alive

I know, I haven't written in over a month.  Depressing stuff.  Honestly I just got to the point at the end of last semester that I couldn't think of anything to write other than "WOW med school sucks.  ALL I do is study ALL the time."  And who wants to read that?  Not even me, hence, I did not write it.  In the meantime, however, things have cleared up and I've found that there are generally lots of things to write about...as my friend A pointed out (quite a while ago...sorry for not following up on it sooner), the blog does not *have* to be about just what goes on while I'm at school each day.  It can also deal with my (gasp!) real life outside of school.  So I'm going to give that a shot and see if it's slightly more tolerable to write that way.  

So...a recap of the last month.  After Thanksgiving (which was lovely), my entire class was basically thrown into double-time torture mode with anatomy labs nearly every day so that we could cram every tiny iota of information about the arm and leg into our rapidly overflowing brains prior to exam week.  I spent far, far too much time smelling like formaldehyde, and there were a few days where I literally didn't leave the school until six or seven at night.  Leaving school without seeing the sun all day is not a good time, fyi.  But even that wasn't the real trouble.  The burnout didn't truly set in until you realized that on top of all of the insane amount of new material being thrown at us in a two week span, we all had to start reviewing everything from the past 3 months as well.  Luckily for me, this wasn't insanely hard because I tend to use flashcards for everything, so I didn't have to crank through an entire book or set of notes or anything like that, but still...the workload was pretty intense.  And the intensity combined with the fact that we had not had a break since after our second test (two months previous) led to a dangerous state of mind by the week the exams actually rolled around.  Luckily, with friends, family, my awesome dog, and the ridiculously addictive Twilight books to keep me relatively balanced, I did not go insane.  In fact, I managed to get through all of the exams in relative mental health and ended up with honors in all of my classes.  

After all of that insanity, we were lucky enough to get a full 17 days off, which has been outright blissful.  The first couple of days were rough--mainly because I kept waking up with a residual panicked feeling, wondering what I had to get done that day--but we have enjoyed a lovely holiday break, complete with family galore at Christmas and a couple of parties and meetings with friends.  I have played far too many video games and watched an entire season of Scrubs.  All in all, I have done just about nothing that require intellectual input, and it's been great.  School starts back up on Monday, so I'm trying to get in as much brainless stupor as possible before launching myself at what I think will probably end up being my new worst enemy--biochem.  I'm sure that will provide some fabulous stories.  For now, though, it's back to Mario and Guitar Hero and tv and sleep, while I still can.