Be A Dentist!

My parents were visiting last week and I had fun showing them the city while doing some exploring myself. They even took me home with them for a niece's baptism and 20 hours after arriving, I was on the Amtrak Surfliner heading back north (only to Santa Barbara, an Amtrak bus took me the rest of the way, 8 hours). 

After a stressful week, it is now Sunday and I have an afternoon to chill. Yesterday I spent 2 hours buying groceries. It took that long because the car I borrowed wouldn't start when I tried to go home. The owners came to rescue me at the grocery store and we figured out why it wouldn't start and I got home fine. Studied. Watched part of the BYU-UCLA game (59-0 Go Cougs!) and studied a bit with some classmates out here. Spent 2 hours tuning up my bike (the wheels are so straight and true now it's awesome, but my brand new  front brake pads squeal loud enough to be heard 5 blocks away, it echoes off of buildings) and went for a 20 mile ride through the San Francisco nightlife. I saw a re-creation of a 1902 Buffalo Bill Cody photo taken on Ocean Beach that an artist had set up, about 40 bonfires further down the beach, lots of people hanging around on sidewalks and waiting outside restaurants, a small streetside photo shoot, and a couple of shopping neighborhoods I didn't even know were there. At night-time just ride around and look for lights down the side streets. It's pretty neat what you'll find. Through the Haight-Ashbury, Market Street, Chinatown, Union Square, Japantown, Clement Street and home. I had my first bike crash. I rode down to the Baker  Beach parking lot just to see what it's like at night and ran my bike into some deep sand and bailed. It was a very soft landing, but now I'm sure I've got sand all inside the moving parts of my bike..... but the Golden Gate Bridge looks really cool from down there at night.

As for dental school, things are really busy but lots of fun. On Mondays we're learning about the clinical side of things, how to do various exams, take health histories, do periodontal probing, head and neck exams, interpret x-rays, etc. Tuesdays we have dental anatomy where we make teeth out of wax and then get graded on how accurate and ideal they look based on all the fine specific anatomy of each tooth. It's really relaxing but the grading is so subjective you'd think they're just randomly picking numbers to make some sort of nice looking bell curve that only has a little to do with the quality of the work. Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings is anatomy lab where we dissect cadavers and learn about the structures and organs of the body. I love it and think it's really neat. You don't really think of the cadavers as people, they're far enough removed from living-ness that it's not as weird as you'd think. I got to remove the heart from ours. We've also completely removed the digestive system, opened kidneys, picked apart the spinal cord, separated individual muscles, nerves, and blood vessels. The only part I don't like is how stinky my hands get (even through the gloves!!) from the phenol/preservative and Fridays it's the worst because then you have to eat lunch shortly afterward.

Wednesdays are learning about restorative dentistry like crowns, making models, taking impressions, casting metals and various other materials. It's like arts and crafts. They even give some fun assignments like making a piece of jewelry out of silver to learn the casting process and making Halloween teeth to learn about making prosthetic mouth pieces from acrylic. 

Thursdays all day is Operative dentistry practicing drilling teeth and filling preparations. It's alright but the tests are killer right now and working in the mirror for the upper jaw is still super awkward. But I am getting better (or at least I was until this week. It's like I reverted or something, so frustrating). 

Sprinkled through the week are biochemistry and anatomy/physiology/histology lectures. We've covered more in the past 8 weeks than I ever covered in a full 14 week semester at BYU. I'm extremely glad that most of it is review from all the classes I took at BYU. Trying to learn this for the first time now would be devastating. 

We have one week left for this quarter and then a week of finals. Weird to think that the first quarter is almost over already. It flew. For anyone that comes to visit, I'll be glad to give a tour of the school and show you around. My parents seemed to enjoy it, I think they were even impressed by the cadavers despite having some reservations initially. 

I'll take this as a chance to brag about how cool this school is. Many schools haven't started, most only barely so. I even just got an official notice from USC that I sadly wasn't accepted into their program. It's official. Shoot and I was so hoping to go.....(LOL)