Roller Coaster

Yesterday was quite a roller coaster ride. I came to school early to get ahead on a few lab projects. I was excited to see my new denture patient that afternoon. My denture patient was scheduled to have a custom impression taken with a tray that I made.

His appointment was at 2:00 pm. I broke his custom tray in half at 7:00 am.
As I started to remake the tray, I remembered that I was supposed to do an assignment for one of my classes, and it was due at 10:00 am. (In my defense, they only gave us one day to do it--we got an email on Monday about the assignment that was due on Tuesday. Still, that's a little embarrassing.)
I quickly got the information for the assignment and realized that not only did I need to do the assignment, but I also needed to print a hard copy.

To print, you have to put money on your ID card in the library and then follow 62 easy steps to use their printers.

7:45 am: Assignment is done (albeit very hurriedly done), money put on ID card, trip to the library, assignment is printed. At this point I decided to skip my 8:00 class (don't tell my teacher) so that I could finish re-doing that tray.

9:00 am: Tray is almost done, headed to class.

12:00 pm: Went to the lab to finish the tray, then set up for my patient.

I needed to check out about 40,000 items for my appointment, but my classmates helped me and made sure I didn't forget anything (that's the #1 way to waste time in the clinic--going back and forth to get items you forgot to pick up before the patient came). I met my patient, and as I was bringing him back to my chair, my scheduler saw me and said, "Lauren, your patient for tomorrow cancelled. You'll have to schedule someone else."

Great.

Worked on my patient for a while and was doing really well on time (the faculty like us to be done by 4:30 pm). At 3:00 I thought I would finish early....
...at 5:05 I realized that I was not going to finish early. Oops.

Finally got it done and asked the patient when he wanted to come again. He said that he really wants his dentures ASAP, so I had to give him the only appointment slot I have open for the next month...the next day's appointment.

Normally that would be fine, but between the first appointment and the second appointment I had about 6 hours of lab work to do in preparation. Gross.

So I was in the lab from 8-11 last night and from 5:30-9 this morning. The life of a dental student is so glamorous, no?

It could be worse, though--Jeffrey has his first night of "call" tonight. Wonder if he'll get to sleep at all...