Clearly, Murphy was a second year dental student in Operative dentistry lab when he made this law.
Operative dentistry is basically the class where we learn how to drill and fill cavities. Like all of our classes, it has its high points and its low points, a few fun things and a few annoying things.
One of the annoying things is that Murphy's Law seems to apply to all of our practical exams. During practicals we work on dummy heads (to be clear, I'm actually talking about manikins--that's not how we refer to our live patients) and drill and fill plastic teeth.
The practicals are timed and graded, and, (as I mentioned before) are often the time in which things go wrong.Disasters happen. Mistakes are made that have never been made before. Drills take on a life of their own. Instruments break, teeth fall out, and other minor catastrophes commonly take place during these two hour exams.
Just today I had a bur break off in the middle of drilling, a screw came loose that was holding in one of the teeth, my filling material squished into places in my manikin that I had never even seen before, and a huge chunk of tooth just broke off for no good reason. The last straw came when I felt my left hand go entirely numb below the elbow because I had been holding it at an awkward angle for 2 hours. Murphy's Law. I had to finish the practical by balancing my mirror on a plastic part of my "patient." (I hear that that's not really acceptable behavior with live patients...)
One of my friends thought he was doing really well until he noticed that a piece of metal he had been using to protect a tooth had inexplicably fractured and caused major tooth damage. Murphy's Law.
If things don't improve soon, I'm going to be forced to go into the "grill making" business--if you know what I mean...
Because nothing says, "Dental school was hard--I dropped out early and this is all I'm qualified to do" like a sparkly grill.
No comments:
Post a Comment