I’ve never had the experience of getting to go away somewhere tropical for spring break. Lounging on beaches and drinking daquiris is the life of luxury I have never been able to afford or have time for. Now that I’m in veterinary school, I’ve ultimately accepted that this will never, ever happen in my life, especially since these are my last couple years of school—not to mention that our “spring break” is a five-day weekend in February.
Ha! I laugh in the face of spring break. Wanna know what I did on my spring break? I got up at 5 a.m. to milk cows my first two days of break. I went skiing at the little ski hill PEI calls a mountain and taught three of my friends (two Canadians and one New Yorker, go figure) how to ski. We had lots of laughs and they had lots of falls, one of which included taking the four of us down in a domino-like chair lift incident that landed a ski into my butt cheek and an ensuing lovely bruise. I milked some more cows and vaccinated some calves, and in between all of this pretended to do work. Sunday, I finally had a day off from work and sat inside listening to the blizzard with 100km/hr winds, hoping that the power didn’t go out and we didn’t lose heat. Today, Monday, I woke up for my last day of break to two feet of snow and PEI being a deserted island. Plows went off the roads last night until visibility improved, so that means roads are closed and impassable. All my classmates who left the island are stuck elsewhere until the Confederation Bridge opens up again, and the hour-long drive on PEI to Charlottetown gets plowed.
Thankfully, I got to catch up on a little sleep and start on studying and getting assignments done. The next two weeks brings seven exams and two assignments due, so this was a much needed head start for me. I knocked out two weeks on my online equine nutrition course, wrote a paper about diagnosing immune-mediated disease, made a table on antimicrobials in vet med, and studied for my medicine midterm this coming Thursday. I also spent a good chunk of time on Netflix, but hey it’s spring break!
