I was still adjusting but I was grateful. Friends started coming together, study sessions, going out to eat, the kind of thing that makes a place feel less foreign. But underneath that I was still uncomfortable. I was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mostly white people, far from everyone I actually knew. That doesn't just go away because you found a study group.

Hiking helped for a while. The dogs loved it and I needed the air. I also quickly learned I was not in the shape I thought I was.

Academically, I figured out something about myself. I did better in clinical skill assessments than on written exams. Which would have been useful information if our grades weren't almost entirely exam based. That setup left no room for error. Fail one exam and you were already in a hole you had to spend the rest of the semester climbing out of.

Mid-semester my body started falling apart. The anxiety hit hard and my POTS and CRPS got significantly worse. I stopped eating regularly, not as a choice but because I'd study until I passed out at my desk and dinner just didn't happen. The house stopped getting cleaned because every minute I wasn't studying felt like a minute I was failing. And watching friends around me do well on exams made all of that worse. I started believing I didn't belong there.

The friend group dissolved quietly. No fight, no conversation. Just new group chats that I wasn't in and plans that stopped including me. Maybe they got tired of inviting someone who was in too much pain to show up. But it still hurt. Even when you know you'd probably say no, being stopped getting asked is its own kind of rejection.

I pulled myself out before they could finish the job. Stopped waiting to be included and just focused on getting through the semester. That was all that mattered at that point. Make it to the end. Everything else could wait.

Well, shit.

I was failing a class. That meant mandatory academic success appointments, check-ins to make sure I was using every resource available. Failing one class first semester wasn't unheard of. Remediate over the summer, move on. Not ideal but survivable.

Then everything got worse at the same time.

My POTS symptoms became severe. My depression hit a level I hadn't felt before. Anxiety wasn't something I had anymore, it was just who I was. I couldn't handle anything. I cried constantly. I felt like a useless piece of shit who had somehow fooled everyone long enough to get here and was finally being found out.

The thoughts started piling on. There goes being the first doctor in the family. There goes making my parents proud. There goes every late night and every sacrifice and every moment I chose studying over sleeping over eating over living. All of it, for what.

I ended up failing more than one class.

First semester. Done.

What the actual fuck, Daphne.

That's all I kept thinking. You worked this hard, you wanted this this badly, and you let it fall apart. I couldn't look at myself. I was furious in the way you can only be furious at yourself, the kind with no clean place to put it.

But after talking with my family and friends, something shifted. What happened in that room wasn't just disappointing. It was discriminatory. They dismissed my disability, literally and figuratively, and I wasn't going to let that be the end of the story.

I wiped my face, put my big girl pants on, and reported the school to the Department of Education.

They were investigated. As they should have been.

The months that followed were a mess. Therapy wasn't helping. I was too deep in disappointment for it to reach me. I had never failed like this before, not at something that mattered this much, and I didn't really know how to carry that.

Then toward the end of July, I got the call.

I could come back. New cohort, start the first year over. A second chance with conditions attached.

Okay. I can do that.

The love for this school died fast.

Orientation felt like a lifetime ago. All that talk about how much they cared about their students, how their door was always open, how they were there for you. A full lie. If you couldn't make it through on your own, you were left behind and quietly written off as someone who probably wasn't cut out for it anyway.

The school was small enough that gossip was its own ecosystem. Students venting about the dean, the associate dean, the pharmacy professor, the physiology professor. And honestly, can you blame anyone. We were paying an obscene amount of money to be poorly taught and then ignored when we said something about it.

That's the part that got me the most. We were there because we wanted to be. Nobody stumbles into vet school. Every single person in those classrooms had fought to get there. We weren't asking for easy. We were asking for competent and we weren't getting it.

I started calling friends at other vet schools. None of them had problems like this. Not even close.

I was mentally and physically done. My body was tired. My head was tired. The school had made it clear it wasn't going to change and I had made it clear, at least to myself, that I couldn't keep doing this.

I needed to leave. I decided to take a medical leave. 

Summer went too fast. It always does.

I wasn't ready to go back but I was more prepared than I'd ever been walking into a semester. Vacation helped. Working at the clinic helped. Getting back into that headspace of actually loving this field, away from the stress and politics of school, reset something in me that needed resetting.

This time I didn't wait for the semester to come to me. I reviewed material beforehand, got familiar with what was coming so I wouldn't spend the first few weeks just trying to catch up. Small thing, big difference.

I also just missed my people. There's something about vet school friends that's hard to explain to anyone outside of it. They're the only ones who truly get what the day to day actually costs. I was ready to be around them again, to have that sense of not doing it completely alone.

But the summer wasn't without its own shit.

I had a racist neighbor who moved in over the summer right across the street. My first experience with racism that I can actually remember and it was disgusting. Being told to get out of America, to go back to my country, all while this person was trying to take one of my dogs. I felt a kind of rage I hadn't felt before. The kind that sits in your chest and doesn't move for a while.

I know where it came from. The current political climate had been bringing out the worst in people and I was living in an environment that already made me feel like I didn't belong. That incident made me feel unsafe in my own home. That's not a small thing.

Eventually I moved forward. Not over it, forward. Because I didn't have a choice and honestly because I refused to let it take up more space than it already had.

I also had a new roommate to adjust to. We'll call her Gill. A whole new dynamic to navigate on top of everything else.

But none of that was going to stop what was coming.

Halfway through the semester my body started sending signals I kept ignoring.

Flare ups became more consistent but I wasn't surprised. I had started adding after hours studying and tutoring sessions which meant less downtime, less rest, less of everything my body needed to function. I knew what I was doing. I made the choice anyway because I genuinely wanted to do better this semester, even if that meant putting my health last.

That only works for so long.

The threshold hit during one of the worst possible weeks. We had one of the biggest exams of the semester, the kind that's notoriously brutal, and three days later our OSCEs. The OSCEs weren't just another assessment. Fail and you get one more chance. Fail that and you fail. Period. I was juggling both and trying to give everything I had to each one.

I did my worst on the exam. And then I failed my OSCEs for the first time.

I was destroyed. Not just disappointed, destroyed. I had worked so hard and it felt like none of it mattered.

The part that made me the most angry was the station I failed on. Uncapping a syringe incorrectly. Except the only way to do it incorrectly is to use your mouth or send the syringe flying across the table. I did neither. One point. One stupid point.

I got the chance to retake it, which should have felt like relief but didn't, because everyone knows the retake is deliberately harder than the original. I practiced every single day. I had students and professors watching me to confirm I was doing everything right. It didn't matter. The outcome felt like it was never really in my hands.

And then something shifted that I didn't have a name for at the time.

For the first time in my life I hit a wall that wasn't just exhaustion. I stopped being myself. I was just a body. A somewhat working brain and a beating heart going through motions. I couldn't think. I couldn't even talk to myself in my head the way I normally do. It went quiet in a way that scared me.

I started slurring my words. I started forgetting how to find words, not just in English but in Spanish too. Languages that lived in my bones just started disappearing mid sentence. I felt nonexistent. Like I was watching my own life from somewhere outside of it.

I stopped going to school regularly. I took approved medical days because I genuinely could not get myself out of bed. Not wouldn't. Couldn't.

And on top of all of it, I had to come home to Gill.