Wonder of Wonders

Yes! I am safe to practice dentistry (under the close supervision of a faculty member in a clinic of the school....)

The first year at UoP is wrapping up for me. A few finals to go this week and then summer break. When school starts again, we start working on real people in the clinic a couple times a week. 

We had a final practical exam two weeks ago and I did pretty good. It was removing an old amalgam filling from a tooth, building it up with a resin and preparing the tooth for a crown, making a temporary crown with acrylic, and taking a final impression (which would be sent to a lab) in 3 hours (The clinic sessions at school last 3 hours, so if we can do this, we're for sure good to go next year....right? Or it's a good indicator at least). The week before the exam we had to give the instructors a tooth (#3, upper right first molar) with a Class II Amalgam filling (fills the crevice in the top of the tooth and goes down the side next to the neighbor tooth) to use for the exam. This kind of thing gave me a lot of trouble a few months ago, but I churned it out in 30 minutes and it was great, better than anything I did for the actual class. The exam went very well except for the final impression, which in real life would be not that big a deal, just try again. But for the exam we only had one chance. Oh well. Overall, I'll probably snag me a B in the class.

Last Wednesday we did our case presentations. Much like the Clinical Excellence day I wrote about recently, this was just a way to have us "present" the work we've done through the quarter to the faculty, as fancy or simply as we like. Some people went all out with crazy displays and decorations. It almost felt like an elementary school fair with cheesy poster boards and cut out pictures and everything, except that besides just snacks and food to butter up the instructors, there was booze as well. 

I made up some stuff about two fictional patients and kept it fairly simple. Made some jokes that the vast majority of people didn't get, but that just reminded me even more of elementary school or junior high. 

Here's the presentation (if Slideshare works)

Eve & Steve

There were no points awarded for creativity, just on the basic requirements, so some people went all out, while others kept it real simple. 

Included below are some other pictures we've been taking. I'm tinkering with picture resizings and stuff, so to fit the 14.7 MP jpegs onto flickr, I shrunk em down by 50% (still 2200xsomething big) but in doing so, lost some of the clarity of the picture (for still such a large photo) and they're a bit pixel-ly. The file sizes dropped from 2-3 megs apiece to 150-200k apiece. I'll have to keep tinkering unless anyone as a quick answer why I lost soo much while still trying to keep the resolution high (I didn't think I changed the dpi or something, but maybe that was it).

While I wait for the upload of pictures onto flickr, here's the funny story of the weekend:

I took Leif and Grace for a walk down to the beach. Thought I'd get a picture of Grace in front of the Baker Beach sign at the entrance to the parking lot. She goes over by the sign and pulls up her dress to her face like she was being shy. I tell her to put it down, but she starts squirming and I ask if she needs to go potty (she was only wearing underwear) and she says yes and half crouches and starts peeing through her underwear right there in front of the sign as a few cars pass by. I'm running up trying to hide her, laughing and yelling at the same time. Then she waddles with me down to the port-a-potty where take them off and wrap em up in toilet paper until we get home. Lol.

Or check out the set easier here