Monday, August 29, 2005

I have been slacking on keeping my operative skills sharp. With the easy weekend, I finally felt like I had some time to spend in the lab to work on cutting cavity preps. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my hands to work. It seemed like if I wanted to go in a certain direction with the handpiece, my hands would go in the opposite direction. Very frustrating. So, tomorrow I'll go in early and practice some more.

At 8am, we had a computers in dentistry midterm. Pathetic. The midterm required us to save a file to our network drives that was sent via email to us. After saving the file, we had to open up the file, enter the date in bold, and enter our name in italics. Once finished with that difficult task, we had to reply to the original email and include the updated document. How sad, and what a waste of time.

After the exam, some of us had a two hour break before our next class. At 11am, we had intro to perio probing (aka gum gardening). Perio probing is a long and tedious process that involves inserting a perio probe (imagine that) into the gum tissue surrounding each tooth and checking for large holes and bone loss. Large holes and bone loss mean surgery that will help the gums to regrow and the bone to regrow. The surgery part piqued my interest but the diagnosis process nearly put me to sleep.