One year is nearly enough, is forever.

My blog is slowly turning yellow and dying, much like the house plants that I can't seem to keep alive. I am fighting the good fight and will occasionally water them too much, but really I just don't seem to have time or energy for blogging or watering.

I think that this thing I am doing, while being one of the best things I have ever done, has filled me up and sucked me dry. I waited all year for the inevitable collapse that all the previous students warned us about during orientation "you will break down at least once crying..." but it hasn't happened in that way. I think that for me anyhow, I just get stretched further and further until anything that isn't part of the goal, that strays off the path, seems like too much effort to do.

My classroom schooling if coming to a quick crazy conclusion. In less than 3 weeks I will be done with school and ready to start my clinical rotations. My first 6 weeks will be spend at the Phoenix Heart Hospital for a cardiac surgical rotation. Not joking. There is a part of me that is totally freaking out right now and feel that I can't possibly be ready to do this. But there is another part of them that feels like I have been in an impossible endurance training schedule for the past year and that the real event is finally coming up.

Excitement. Fear. I don't even know where the line is drawn between to them. Every day I do things that one year ago I wouldn't have dreamed of doing. I feel the same yet I am different. I see the world through a different lens than I did one year ago. I am pumped to actually get my hands dirty, be in an OR, stitch a patient, help someone, but at the same time, the responsibility of that is very humbling. Someone has to be your first, but you just hope your hands don't shake so bad that you can't do it.

Now that I am almost done with the classroom, hindsight has it looking pretty relaxed, low stress, low responsibility. Funny because that wasn't the case at all for most of it, but now that my testing will be on the spot in front of patients, doctors, nurses, and other students, the paper exams are looking more stress free every day.

I will try to occasionally pop in here, if only to retain a small piece of my soul from my previous life, when I was hated my job enough to make this drastic change and forever changed my path in life.