a week of dental surgery

If you follow my insta-stories, then you know I had the opportunity to do dental surgeries last week. It's one thing to drill on someone's tooth and place a restoration. But it's a completely different story to cut away someone's gum tissue, remove parts of their jaw bone, teeth, and then stitch them back up again!

Every week we get to spend 3 blessed days in clinic with real patients and last week I rotated through our oral & maxillofacial surgery clinic. Even with having multiple patients cancel and no-show, I still got to extract 10 teeth (including a few third molars/wisdom teeth), participate in an alveoloplasty, and treat a case for dry socket. A definite highlight of my week was taking the initiative to learn a few more suturing techniques. During one of our canceled appointments, I spent that time learning the continuous horizontal locking mattress suture and the timing couldn't have been more perfect since I ended up placing that stitch on multiple patients last week. And can I just say, they were beautiful stitches. I promise to do a proper day in the life of a dental student for pulling teeth, but for now I just wanted to document what a great week I had because I'll need the high I'm living on from last week to carry me through this one since I have an oral pathology midterm to study cram for.