Dec 20, 2005 16:55
I am currently sitting at gate C9, in the Nashville International Airport. I just watched GW talk about how the Patriot Act is up for renewal, and there are members of the senate that are attempting to filibuster the renewal bill. Apparently he thinks this is irresponsible. I don’t agree. He says that it does something to keep us safe, but I don’t buy it. It is just a tricky way of letting the government spy on regular folks, just like it has always done.
The last 24 hours has been odd, and strange, but now it’s over. I didn’t sleep at all Thursday night. I was too on edge about my goddamn tooth morphology final. I knew all of the answers, but I often second guess myself. That is just my nature really. I always second guess the facts that I can express in written form. If I speak them, it is no big deal at all. So the test was three parts. First, there was a written, then a carving practical and then a tooth identification portion. Each part has its own unique idiosyncrasies.
In the written final, you have to correctly answer no fewer than thirty eight (out of fifty) questions to pass. The questions are all multiple choice, but they are tricky. For example, one question shows the mandibular, right, quadrant of teeth and there is an arrow pointing to one of the teeth. If you just look at the arch, you realize that there are three molars, no premolars, a canine, a lateral incisor, and a central incisor present. However, the trick is that you have to realize that this is a kid who is about seven or eight, that is in the mixed dentition stage, and has 24 teeth in their mouth. So the tooth (and the answer) is that it is the PERMANENT RIGHT MANDIBULAR LATERAL INCISOR. So they are all tricky like that. Some are gimmes; maybe two on the whole test. The rest, they make you work for. In the next phase, you take a block of wax that is two inches long and five eights of an inch thick and wide. Then you are asked to carve a permanent maxillary first molar in three hours or less, expressing all of the proper dimensions and features specific to that tooth, to scale. So I did that, and it went fine. In the last section, you have to identify ten teeth, as follows:
PERMANENT OR PRIMARY
MAXILLARY OR MANDIBULAR
RIGHT OR LEFT
CENTRAL INCISOR, LATERAL INCISOR, CANINE, 1 PM, 2 PM, 1M, 2M, 3M
That part was tougher, but I did well on it also. One of the ways that you can tell which side of the tooth is the mesial and which is the distal (and hence whether the tooth is a right or a left) is that the cementoenamel junction of the tooth is one millimeter more on the mesial. So, you have to have a well calibrated eye. A few teeth have other clues that can help you tell too. For example, the permanent mandibular canine has the mesial side of its root as a continuous straight line from the mesial crest of convexity down to the apical third of the root. This makes the tooth really easy to spot.
But, in dentistry, there is no for sure thing, or what they call in the South, “The Okey Doke.” Meaning, since dentistry is governed by the field of biology, anything can happen essentially. And it often does. Sometimes people have extra lobes in their teeth, or fewer lobes, or the teeth are altogether missing. Sometimes they are bigger than normal, sometimes they are smaller. So you have to be prepared to look into someone’s mouth and figure out how the puzzle pieces all fit together. I don’t think most people realize how difficult dentistry really is.
Before coming to dental school, I thought that I had a pretty good idea of how dentistry worked, and what the job entailed. Boy was I wrong. There is so much more to it than that. There is nothing superficial about any of it. I knew that the training for an allopathic physician and a dentist is the same, save for the dental classes. But I never realized how much there is to the dentistry part of it. I remember reading the schedule for the year and seeing that we had an occlusion class that lasts all spring semester. Occlusion is the science of how the mandible and maxilla articulate, and how this affects the teeth in between the moving and non-moving bone. So I thought, shit, after we talk about that for a few hours, what will we do the rest of the time? Well, I was wrong about that too. There is a ton of shit to occlusion. And I am going to be a master of it all.
Another thing that I think people don’t realize is how many ways that you can die from problems related to how you take care of your teeth. For example, abscesses that form can cause airway obstructions that can result in asphyxiation. Also, untreated abscesses can burrow their way into the blood supply, causing sepsis (bacterial colonization of the blood…horrible way to die) or colonization of the valves of the heart. This may sound benign, but once the bacterial colony grows to a certain size, it can then break off and end up lodged in the one of the coronary vessels, causing a myocardial infarction or heading up the aortic arch and ending up in the brain, causing a stroke, which can also eventually kill you and or make your life a living hell. This dissemination of the infection into the blood is called anachoresis.
One of my dear friends that I went to GU with called me and told me that he is planning on applying to dental school this year but is concerned about his personal statement. He said that he didn’t know what to write and felt like there weren’t any lives to be saved like there is in medicine, and you don’t really improve the quality of people’s lives with dentistry. According to him, all you do is fill teeth. I kind of got pissed, because there is so much more to it, and I hope that by this point you have caught a glimpse of what I mean.
So, after the test, we went out to a Mexican restaurant to eat, and then I went home and collapsed for about six hours. When I woke up, I had to pack and get everything ready for the trip. So I did that. My friends called, and wanted to go out to celebrate, and I didn’t really feel like going, plus I had a shit load of work to do. So I just kept on working and getting my affairs in order. My buddy Oscar called me and he had just woke up around midnight, and he wanted to go out to meet all of our friends at this place called “Bar 23.” Celebrities hang out there, but it is a club, and it is really loud, and years of gunfire have not been kind to my inner ear, so I go to clubs and I can’t hear anything that anyone says. So I just smile and nod a lot. Oscar talked me into going, and he was driving, so it was okay.
So we went to the club. There were about ten dents and twenty meds there. The club closed about forty minutes after we got there, so that was fine with me. Then everybody wanted to go the Waffle House for breakfast. It was around 0330 at this point. So we went to the Waffle House on North Charlotte, near the Crystals drive-in. In one mile in each direction, there is another Waffle House. In fact, there are a shit load of them here. Apparently they are really popular, and I haven’t really figured out why. The food is mediocre at best, but it is cheap. They don’t have biscuits and gravy, which in my book is definitely a negative. So we went there, and we kind of took over the place.
Besides us, there were four Aryan looking blond men, and two very country looking hunters, in realtree camouflage, sitting in the booth behind me. And here is where it all goes to shit:
Two of the meds stand up and go to the jukebox.
One of the Aryans tells Vernon to pull up his pants.
Vernon ignores them.
They tell him again to pull up his pants (which really aren’t that baggy…he is just thin).
One of the Aryans tells him and the other dude (Ron) to, “Take their nigger asses outside then.”
The Aryans stand up.
Ron shoves one of them.
There is a mad shuffle, and one of the Aryans reaches back behind his hip for a 9mm pistol.
Just then, the two hunters get up and head for the door. They go outside, and get shotguns.
I sat at the booth, and covered everything with my pistol in my hand, under the table.
The Aryans make a backward shuffle, hands on their guns, for their truck.
Twelve people hold Vernon and Ron back, who are now yelling and waving their arms around just like we have all seen in the movies dozens of times.
The hunters, the most heavily armed of anyone present, TELL THE ARYANS TO HIT THE FUCKIN’ ROAD, shotguns at the ready!
Then there were all kinds of cussing and drama, and talk about how we are doctors and how we shouldn’t be doing stuff like that. But at that point, nobody seemed to care. People were just pissed. Fortunately, none of the dents did a thing. We all kept our composure. And luckily nobody got shot.
Then, after all of this shit that went down, Ron got pissed because his hash browns weren’t smothered and covered. So he stood up, yelled at the waitress, and then threw his plate at the woman. It hit the ground and shattered. Then the shit hit the fan again. This time the cook picked up a red phone on the wall and the cops showed up. Then, all of the meds and a few of the dents left. There were only five of us at the end, enjoying our breakfasts.
So today was a day about lessons. The patriot act doesn’t keep us safe. Racial epithets are never appropriate. And judging someone based on appearance (even if it is realtree camo and even if the men look like they could be cover models for the KKK Quarterly) is never okay. And being discreetly armed at all times is always a good idea. The first rule of a gunfight: have a gun.