Well. The first three years cause sleep deprivation and generalized agony, too. 4th yr does both of those, but not as badly as the first three years. Most people, in my one-school experience, immensely preferred 4th yr to the first three. People tend to get so absorbed in the "I've been here 12 hours...." that they forget how much the first 3 yrs sucked.
And honestly, there are some people who just love to complain about it and love to bring it on themselves. I had plenty of classmates who pulled the "oh my god, I'm so tired, I've been here 5,3021,043 hours in a row" when they <could> have gone home - they just have some sort of bizarre martyr complex.
And, well, I work 14+ hr shifts with no breaks out in real life. So the whole "being in the teaching hospital 12 hours with no breaks" ... meh. Not impressed. I also got tired of the whole "omg my case is going so poorly I just had to euthanize blah blah". You didn't euthanize it (or whatever) - the actual DVM who is actually responsible for the actual case did. Some 4th yrs just have this tendency to over-dramatize everything and pretend to have more responsibility than you really do as a student.
Not saying you shouldn't 'think' about the cases as your own - that's how you start to learn to take responsibility and think like a doctor. But at the end of the day, a DVM owns those cases, not you the student.
I scheduled almost all my externships toward the end (all but one were after January). It was fabulous. Had my NAVLE results, spent the last few months mostly off site peacing out .... I highly recommend that approach.
Don't let the 4th yrs get you down. You'll enjoy it. It'll be better than the first 3.
