Tuesday, August 16, 2005

I decided to sleep in this morning until 6:30. I needed to catch up on some sleep. You would think I had time on Saturday or Sunday to sleep in a little bit, but with exams on Mondays, I find myself staying up late on the weekends to study so I can be with the family during the day. Anyhow, I got up a little later, and I took my time getting to school.

At 9am, we had a quiz in Dental Anatomy. These quizzes aren't that difficult. It usually requires about an hour of studying notes and test files to do well. After the quiz, we moved to the sim lab and started our wax up of tooth #12. I'm determined to do better on this wax-up than I did on my last wax-up. In addition to a wax-up of #12, we are required to do a wax-up of number #6 at home. The nice thing about wax-ups or carvings is that it's the only time I can watch a movie or TV while doing school work.

We had a brown bag lunch with the Dean. The lunch happens once a quarter and the Dean discusses current events in dentistry, happenings at the school, policy changes, or whatever he feels like. Yesterday, since we recently elected class officers, he talked about how to escalate concerns to his level.

In the afternoon, we had a lecture on the lungs. Afterwards, we went upstairs to the cadaver lab. We sawed through the sternum and ribs and removed the rib cage. Next we located the root of the lung, which contains the pulmonary arteries and veins, the bronchi, the lymph nodes and other arteries, and sliced through it with our scalpels. Once we completed the cut, we could completely remove the lung from the thoracic cavity. We spent some time indentifying nerves, vessels, and lobes.

For our last meeting of the day, we had a seminar in the large conference room downstairs. We went over clinical conditions of the lungs and abdomen.

After school, I stayed in the lab and cut preps on #3, #13, and #8 (crown prep). The professors recommend 30 to 60 minutes a day cutting teeth with our handpieces. I also sat down with a classmate and started studying for our big anatomy exam next Tuesday.

I got home at 9:30pm. It was a long day. I think I'm going to change up my schedule a bit. I'm going to limit the nights I stay at school past 5pm to once a week. Now that I've got a handle on the way things work here, I don't feel the need to spend all day at school.