BLAH-g

I've been trying to get back into blogging habit, but to tell you the truth, I've been feeling more "blah" than "blog."

It's not that going back to school is so bad, it's just that it pales in comparison to spending time with your family, opening Christmas presents, and eating enough sweets to cause the immediate formation of diabetes.

Like it or not, though, school started again--and this time the stakes are higher. We will be in the school clinic working on REAL LIVE patients in one semester! Things that used to make you throw your hands in the air and say, "Oh great! Now I have to start over on this project," will suddenly turn into accidents that make you throw your hands in the air and run away from your patient because now they need dentures. Scary.

One of the major stressors today at school happened in our endodontics (root canal) class. You may remember my telling you that I've been collecting extracted teeth for the last 2 years--that's because we're required to provide our own teeth to practice on for our endo class. Unfortunately, they don't just require extracted teeth, they require specific types of extracted teeth with no chips, cracks, or fillings and complete roots.

Here's the rub...

Dentists don't usually extract teeth that have no chips, cracks, or fillings. Why? Because they're usually good teeth, that the people are pretty attached to having in their mouths. Even worse, one of these magical perfect teeth has to be a front tooth. Many of us simply do not have an extracted front tooth because almost no one in the world wants to lose that tooth! Dentists spend hours drilling, filling, crowning, correcting, and even begging those front two teeth to stay in patients' mouths because that's what makes their patients happy. Nonetheless, we need some--100, to be exact.

So in the name of dentistry, we need some of you blog readers to bite the bullet (which will be difficult because of the tooth loss) and get your perfectly good two front teeth taken out.
Thanks in advance.