Friday, January 11, 2019

friday favorites: 01.11.19 dental edition

Did you ever have a really good work week? Like a great perfect wonderful week. Yea, me either. But this one was pretty darn close. I've been feeling so overwhelmed with life lately so I needed this.
 Being 4 hours away from home makes it pretty difficult to organize my life and my time right now. And checking off all the boxes to get all the things done before graduation in May is terrifying. I can't even. While I've been behind on my favorite hobby, who am I kidding, my only hobby of blogging, I'm making some time to share this incredible week I've had. I still have lots to share from December + the holidays + life, oh and that time we went to Morocco. But for now, here are my favorites from the week. 



Root Canals 
I don't know that I will ever be that dentist that loves doing root canals, so I wasn't exactly looking forward to starting my Monday with one this week. It was my first multi-rooted tooth and I finished it in one appointment. That never happens! This means two things: 1.) I'm getting more comfortable and a lot faster with doing these and 2.) This root canal helped me hit and surpass the point minimum needed to graduate for root canals. 

All the Points 
Speaking of points, I have been sooo stressed out about earning enough points to graduate from dental school. Every clinical procedure we do with a patient has a point value associated with it and we need 7k points to graduate. For reference, pulling a tooth is only worth 4 points, while doing a crown in only worth 6 points. And we need 7,000 points to graduate. 7,000! For a while there, I had been behind the class average, but the current clinic I'm at is amazing with so many great cases. This week alone, I earned 328 points, which is almost double the class average of 183 points for the week. 

Crowns & Bridges 
Did I mention that the current clinic I'm rotating through is amazing? In the year and a half that I treated patients at the dental school, I only did one crown. Crowns/placing caps on teeth are an important procedure for general dentists. I did 3 this week alone and have even completed my skills assessment on this procedure.

Pulling Teeth 
I got to do a full mouth extraction this week. This happens when the remaining teeth in the patients mouth are in such bad shape that nothing its salvageable, so you pull everything out to do denture/implants. My patient needed 24 teeth extracted. Many of them were is such bad shape that they were crumbing and breaking as we went, so I had to cut open the gums (and bone in some cases) in order to retrieve the entire tooth root. I'm probably totally grossing some people out right now, but for me, this is my idea of a good day. 

I know this post was all dental, but that is what dominant my week and I wouldn't have had it any other way. I love what I'm doing and I needed a week like this one to remind how lucky I am and to help me push through the stressful parts of dental school. 
linking up with fridayfavorites//

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