I just took the National Board Dental Examination, Part I. And here’s the thing… the freakin’ thing takes over your mind. I was talking to a few of my classmates who also took it early, and I wondered aloud if they were experiencing what I had been: “In all of our lectures, do you keep picking up random facts and thinking damn, THAT’S what the answer was?!” They said that they too were experiencing this. They agreed: it is an unpleasant side effect of answering so many questions — your brain is constantly searching for the answers.
So, at the end of the day you sit there and think WOW I’m glad to be done with that. Then your brain says “well, you might have to take it again if it didn’t go well.” And then another part of your brain says, OKX percentage results in passing. Do you think you got that many right? Well, you think: I got Y percentage on that half practice test I took… that was good enough for passing. Yes, your brain replies: but the actual test was a hellish journey through arcane facts — do you think you did that well again? I really don’t know.
And then a part of you is so happy that it’s over for the time being that you’re just giddy. I stood in the kitchen, watching the bread for my sandwich toast… and I started thinking this thought: “Toast sure is great. Is there anything better than toast? Hot, crispy bread. Wow, toast is great. I should get the word out on toast.” And then I caught myself: “Heeeey now, you’re just happy that you don’t feel guilty every moment you aren’t studying for boards, because you took them!” And you circle back around to “But you might not be done studying — you might have to do the same thing all over again, but in the beautiful month of May.”
AAAAAAAHHHHHH.
I paid $265 to take this test on a computer, and it takes them 3 weeks to get the results back to me. THREEWEEKS. So, I anticipate I’ll be like this until then.
Right now, I’m sitting here on the couch next to Mykala, and our cat George is gently purring as he sleeps on my lap. I don’t care how I did.
Industrialization: we’ve lost the ability to grow our own food, build our own shelter, entertain ourselves, and now, walk:
Slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency
rooms in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped,
fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to
talk or text. That was twice the number from 2007, which
had nearly doubled from 2006, according to a study
conducted by Ohio State University, which says it is the
first to estimate such accidents.
Gomez has a song called “Bone Tired”. Ben Ottewell’s singing makes the lyrics sound much more poetic than they look in print. Anyhow, it’s an interesting song from my perspective of early semester exhaustion.
Oh no, why do you always complain?
Burn bright but you’re bone tired and feeling it
Anyhow, the song’s good… and (coincidentally) semi-relevant. Also: one of my competencies for graduation is to start a patient on a smoking cessation program. If you know anyone who a smoker and might be receptive to some information about quitting, or is interested in trying to quit, let me know.
Other competencies include doing a complete set of dentures for a patient. I’m excited about that, to think that I helped them to be able to chew again is really exciting to me.
This afternoon, I’ll go into clinic for the second time. I’ll observe a student dentist (or hygiene student) go through a full patient appointment. You have to check the patient’s chart, understand underlying medical conditions, scan for drug conflicts, meet the patient, find out why the patient is there, determine recent changes in their medical history, consult with specialists about treatment plans, possibly do some treatment, take radiographs, explain things to the patient, obtain consent, plan the time of the next visit, and on and on.
I definitely feel confident in my hand skills… but that’s a small part of the entire visit. There is so much to learn.
I’m nervous for the first time I do this solo, which could be within a week. I’m not good at small talk… but I still need to practice. So, “yes” to small talk… but not too much, since I could put myself in a conversational cul-de-sac. I feel a little low on the knowledge required to do a great job at this. I realize that’s why we’ll be doing this for the next 2 and a half years… but I really would prefer to get some more observing experience in before I see my first patient.
Oh, and if you do want to come in for an appointment with me, send me a message and the school will get you in.
Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry
about my hair; it’s always been that way.
I enjoy both Leno and Conan (additionally, Jimmy Fallon’s show could mature into a great asset). But NBC has royally screwed up their entire late night schedule. If Leno wasn’t ready to retire, they should’ve let things be for a while… Leno at 11:35, followed by Conan… and then they chould have put Jimmy Fallon on after that. But this quagmire looks like it is going to kill off the institution of ‘The Tonight Show’, Conan’s career, and poor Jimmy Fallon’s show (still in its infancy). What a mess.
Gail Collins is quite funny; more so than I realized. Take a look at her recent column “The Wizard With a Bad Plan”
I would like to offer two comments about this. One is
that professional athletes should not Twitter. I got this
thought from Ashley Mayo, a student at the Columbia
Journalism School, who showed me an essay that she had
written on the subject, which included a tweet from one
of the Indiana Pacers containing the good news that he
had begun the day with a triumph over irregularity.
In one study, Benedetti found that Alzheimer’s patients
with impaired cognitive function get less pain relief
from analgesic drugs than normal volunteers do. Using
advanced methods of EEG analysis, he discovered that the
connections between the patients’ prefrontal lobes and
their opioid systems had been damaged. Healthy volunteers
feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost.
Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the
future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only
the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests
that because Alzheimer’s patients don’t get the benefits
of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses
of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.
Elliott Marcus, an associate commissioner of the health
department, said that he knew where the trouble spots
were. “It’s these high-end places for people who think
that the rules don’t apply to them,” he said.
Let me tell you about a mistake I’ve made: at some point in your life, you’ll think the rules don’t apply to you. This is probably not true. It certainly wasn’t for me. So don’t get cocky.