Failure Is Sometimes an Option!

Exam block 3 has come to an end. I left the exam block with my brain mostly unscathed. In all my years of education I have never had a series of exams that I felt the load of material was impossible to memorize or understand.  In the past, I had failed exams because of laziness or lack of dedicated study skills. Exam block 3 forced my brain to a level I never thought obtainable and in fact was not fully obtainable.  I ended up passing 7/9 exams. On the positive side, if that was a MLB batting average I would be batting .778, which is Hall of Fame material! I had to prioritize my time in order to fail the least amount of classes.  On average I feel most  of my peers failed at least 2-3 exams. I minimized the damage to my GPA by failing the exams in the classes where exams are weighted less.
Clinical Skills and Community Doctoring have participation points, reports, quizzes, and practical exams that buffer my grade for the occasional failed exam.
For another positive note I definitely improved my physiology grade.  Physiology is one of my favorite classes, but the exams are extremely stressful. The exams have around 50 minutes to answer 40 questions.  Sounds doable and it is, but physiology exams get my pits sweating every time I click the BEGIN button on that exam.  The reason physiology is so stressful is due to the fact that we have an amazing professor who loves to challenge us.  The questions she asks are pretty straight forward, but are multilevel questions.  So knowing a complete concept and not just parts of a concept is very important.  Our topics for this exam were about blood, circulatory shock, and heart disease.
Most of my other grades remained about the same, and I continue to get mostly B's and a few A-'s in medical school, which is well above my expectations of what I thought I would be able to accomplish.
Life is pretty good now that exam block 3 is over and Thanksgiving break is the light at the end of the tunnel.  After Thanksgiving break comes exam block 4 and then finals.  Medical school is definitely feeling doable, still stressful, but doable!
Immediately after the test block, Hailey and I headed to a small retreat with some ward friends, and also distant relatives.  We went to one of the LDS camps called Camp Zarahemla by Clear Lake, WA.  We roomed in a large lodge with 4 other families and had a blast playing games, eating good food, and relaxing on couches by a large wood furnace.  Olive was not the happiest camper that night.  We probably only got 4-5 hours of sleep on and off as she was waking up and thinking it was play time. She is going through a phase where she can't sleep if someone is in the room with her and she is waking up every 4 hours at night.  We're working on that. Here are some fun pictures of our adventure.