Maxillofacial
I figured out that Wednesday consisted of just under 8 hours of class. However, the final class I had on Wednesday, I only have once a month. My ride there, unfortunately, was not able to drive, so they just gave me the keys to the car. As I did not having enough cash on my person to simulaneously pay them for gas and pay for parking, my sister graciously drove me over to the class and picked me up. This month, we will be visiting orthodontists and oral surgeons, and it looks like it will be very interesting. The final doctor to present during class on Wednesday was hilarious. He is a maxillofacial surgeon (which includes oral surgery - he became a surgeon and got a PhD in Biochemistry at the same time) … anyways he opened with a slide of a guy with a dinner fork stuck in his face. The man, an inmate at a local prison, said he was simply minding his own business at dinner and somebody came up from behind him and jabbed a fork into his face. Yeah right. The first picture was straight at the front of the man’s face, and you could see the fork with the tongs buried about an inch into his the tissue right below his eye. The side x-ray was the funniest: there was just a skull and then perfect profile of a fork buried in the cloudy soft tissue. Apparently, the operation to remove the fork went pretty smoothly. After that, we saw more typical things, like facial reconstruction. The incisions around the eyes were particularly interesting: in order to screw the titanium surgerical grade screws into the bone, surgeons make incisions around the eye socket (so as to avoid scars), and sometimes actually remove the eyeball to get at things. Very cool. Jaw surgery was particularly interesting; the upper jaw bone was actually sawed in half and then re-set (using those screws again) to a new position. Particularly stunning was the way in which the soft palette can simply be cut, peeled back to expose the bone, and still heal back to normal usually within a week or two. What interesting stuff.
Yes, the women in the program are still ridiculously good looking - even one of the dentists I observed with pointed this out, and she’s a married mom.
My parents are in Texas, Katy is going to Arizona this weekend - everyone is all over the country this month! I think I will stay right around here, learn some stuff, and take a spring break at the end of this month.
I reclaimed my room for next year, I have been trying to help a couple people with deciding whether they want singles or quads, roomates or none, on campus or off. Getting in the habit of living in one place is a good thing, but one tends to wonder if there is something better. As for me, I am happy where I am right now.
After hearing this, I wrote a little ditty on guitar. My picking is slowly getting faster, but mashing my fingers into funny shapes is a still a little aggravating right now. New form of entertainment: drumming the fingers that have guitar calluses on stuff and listening to the great percussive effect.