Sooooo.... Remember a few months back when I said that I wasn't burnt out from vet school? Well. I changed my mind. I am officially burnt out. All right. I'm not completely and totally burnt out. But I'm definitely feeling the chronic effects of 4th year. It's 4:30 am and I'm the lone human holding down the fort in ICU until the morning tech comes in. I'm tired but I have to stay awake and make sure these 6 dogs and 1 cat don't decide to do something crazy (i.e. die). I'm about halfway through my clinical year. It's gone by fairly fast and I've truly enjoyed most of my rotations and learned a lot from them. I took my national boards (NAVLE) last week and I am SO GLAD they are over. Hopefully I passed so that I don't have to retake them in the spring. It's one of those things where I'd like to believe I passed but you just can't really know for certain until you see that official "PASS".
I don't know if I told you this already, but I have officially decided not to do an internship. I decided that I really want to do a little bit of everything and I wouldn't be able to do that if I specialized. As much as I love internal medicine, I don't want to only do internal med. I may want to do internal med like 80% of the time, but I would also like to do some surgeries in life, I would like to do general medicine like vaccines and seeings lots of cute puppies/kittens, I want to see a variety of emergencies, and I also want to work with small rodents like ratties. :) So it really does seem a 24-hr hospital that also sees regular appointments would be the PERFECT environment for me. But here comes the confounding factor of today's times..... the job market SUCKS. It is so scary to go into this field at at time like this when many hospitals just aren't hiring. I'm going to get a move on the job search soon. I'm also planning on taking my California state boards in February when I head over to Yorba for my externship. Only 6 months of school left and there's still so much to do. I'm worried about my future but I'll be glad when it finally gets here!
