I asked a fellow dental student of mine what he was doing this weekend. “Going to get a cavity filled.”
Mykala and I are busy, busy. She’s gone all weekend for a dance competition and I have a straight set of finals starting Monday. It’s times like these, when you think you haven’t the time, when you absolutely must take a moment to make your significant other feel special in any way you can. It’ll save your relationship, so you can weather the times you both forget to nurture.
“Good lord, you guys look like you came out of a war zone — it’s just a test!”
— The fantastic Dr. Tautin, after our 4 hour prosthodontic lab practical
This man, one of the bench dentists who evaluates and guides us through labs, saved my sanity in Oral Anatomy lab first semester. In a class with the purpose of weeding out those who didn’t want to be in school (and the distant second goal of teaching oral anatomy), he did his best to get a new flock of uptight students to settle down. On waxing up a tooth: “If it looks like a tooth, you’re on the right track.”
Here are some selected quotes from literally the best professor I have ever had the pleasure of learning from. Dr. Katz could teach p-chem to third graders.
“I’ve seen your schedule — it’s incredible. You guys are really, really busy. Me, I just sit around all day and blow bubbles and come in here occasionally to talk to you.”
We’re learning how to prep teeth for full gold, porcelain fused to metal, and all porcelain crowns. That is, we’re taking 60,000 RPM pneumatic dental drills fitted with diamond-studded burs and… cutting plastic teeth (funny, eh?) fitted in something called a typodont which is mounted in a very nice simulated patient (complete with cheeks, semi-realistic range of motion, etc.). Thing is, it is tricky work. The next time your dentist picks up a mirror and drill in order to place a filling in your back upper molars… be thankful they first practiced on a set of plastic teeth.
To the upper class-people of the University of Minnesota School of Dentistry, us incoming D1s must have looked like cows queueing up for the slaughter — doe-eyed and well-rested as we were. After this week is over, I’d finally call us seasoned professional school students. What a break-in.
The spark of creativity is one of the most singularly electrifying experiences of the human condition. To bring something, no matter how small, out of nothing — a clever turn of phrase, a pleasant melody, an arrangement of paints on a canvas — is a powerful experience. In dental school, I miss the creative spark intensely. The longing for time to write a melody on the piano or a poem in a notebook makes me wonder: would I feel the opposite way were I in music school? That is to say: after countless assignments to “compose a melody in this time and this key signature,” would I crave a list of facts to memorize, a test in which the subjective was eliminated and I could objectively, predictably achieve success?
This Southwest Airlines Commercial entitled “Deposit” illustrates why following instructions is important. And here’s the thing about those drive-through bank teller set-ups: should I be trying to make eye contact with the lady on the other side? I mean, they can see and hear me, and I can hear them… yet, isn’t there kind of a void there? I raise the question because I think there is at least one person in tumbledry’s audience who can provide advice.
Ostensibly, the reason for my total radio silence on tumbledry is clear: the second half of my first semester of dental school was extraordinarily busy. For example: for the first time since I began working out in 1999, I voluntarily gave up the gym for six weeks. I ran through gross anatomy flash cards on the bus to and from school, I ran through flash cards before sleeping, I ran through flash cards with Mykala, I ran through flash cards while walking across the train tracks between my bus stop and apartment, I woke up running through flash cards in my mind. Incidentally, I slept little. I skipped so many meals that by the end of the semester I looked at the mirror and was shocked to see someone who appeared quite gaunt. So, that would seem to be the full story. It is not.
Every year at some point before Halloween, I imagine myself going to a large, fabulous party somewhere in celebration. That worked out last year, though I managed to sabotage a potentially good time. So this year, we keep expectations low. In celebration of Halloween, I will:
Continue wedding planning with my fiancée.
In the process of (1), spend more than 20 consecutive minutes in the same room as Mykala.
Twelve hour dental school days aren’t even long anymore. They’re just typical. At the end of them, you come back home (starving, if you didn’t pack a dinner) and just settle in and try to concentrate on more work until bedtime. Thankfully, nothing is hard per se… it’s just a gigantic pile of things to memorize.
This has been the longest shortest week I can remember — that is to say, the days have been very long, to the point that I can scarcely differentiate Monday from Tuesday from Wednesday and so on. The days just blur from one to the next… I can feel my mind, like a muscle in training, becoming better and better at learning (which is helpful) but I feel my body become more and more tired. And so… I’m off to the library in a minute to see how long I can study there.
Today was fail. Tomorrow we try again. Tonight, we prepare for tomorrow. This weekend… well, I haven’t thought that far ahead. Also: this text brought to you by a first-person plural personal pronoun used in the archaic (for English) T-V distinction.
Dentistry — hoo boy, they make you earn it to work in this occupation. It was a long long day, and my left eye seems to be twitching for some reason. (Note to left eye: please stop! Ok, thanks, bye!) I did make it outside to sit and eat a spot of lunch with Mykala as she was coming back from Marriage and Family Therapy related classes. Such a (literal, figurative, actual, metaphorical, etc., et al.) ray of sunshine in the middle of the day.
Mykala recently told me about a study she read that said 25% of med school students have suicidal thoughts during their four years of schooling. I would imagine this extends to most kinds of professional school, and I think it points to the ridiculous demands and pressures bearing down on students. The school breaks you down unless you do something to fight that erosion.
Strict dress code at the U of M School of Dentistry: wear scrubs or business casual; no jeans, hats, torn clothing, etc. Now that scrubs have arrived, no one is wearing business casual anymore. Mine were back-ordered, but finally came in, so today was my first day wearing the standard outfit for the next four years. It’s a little surreal because:
A little update on the status of my dental learnings is in order. We aren’t getting too hammered with courses until Histology and Gross Anatomy are added in October (then the real fun begins).
All of us D1 students have a class called “Dental Care Delivery and Oral Epidemiology” which we simply abbreviate “DCD.” Today, we took the midterm for DCD (the final is next week… huh?) There really is some valuable material in the class, especially with regard to enhancing and measuring the increase in oral health of a community. However, the structure of guest lecturers (sometimes two per session) means studying for the test is an exercise in adapting to many different styles of teaching. One particularly entertaining lecturer was a retired dentist who recently retired from teaching at the U as well. This guy is a really entertaining and unbelievably knowledgeable speaker. He has, quite literally, seen it all — he casually mentioned the characteristic signs of marijuana usage, bulimia, methamphetamine abuse, etc. Naturally, we had quite a few questions from his presentations on our midterm. My strategy for some of the questions I wasn’t quite sure of was to play clips of this fellow reading different answer options in my head. This worked sometimes, but other times all I could hear was “you bet your sweet bippy,” which was an expression he used to indicate that “you are darn right “X” is true.” It was entertaining, but not particularly useful.
We did dental indices on our peers today — so, this was the first time I have ever in my life probed around someone’s gums using actual dental instruments.
I’ve never sweat so much in my life.
By the time I was done with my rotation as examiner, my nitrile gloves were transparent from sweat. Posture, working in your mirror, keeping your hands braced on the person’s face, not blinding them with light, not poking them in their soft palate… so many things to keep in mind. And all we were doing is counting teeth and testing the health of the mouth! Drilling and filling a cavity seems a lifetime away right now. I think the hardest part is knowing what someone is comfortable with; I mean, it’s one thing to say you can (and should) brace your working hands on your patient’s face, but it’s quite another thing to physically maneuver your hands into the correct positions. I’m nervous and excited to get better at this.
Sigur Rós’s song “Festival” makes a pretty darn good soundtrack for a Friday afternoon. I’ve survived my first oral anatomy assessment and there’s nothing like listening to great music to unwind on this beautiful afternoon. If you listen to the (admittedly low-fi) link to the song, I think you’ll find the male falsetto to be nearly unearthly-beautiful.
