I spent pretty much the entirety of Friday with my cadaver head. I started off taking full mouth x-rays. It took me a ridiculously long time! I got good pictures of everything in about 2 hours, with a little help from the tech now and then. I probably could have done it faster if I’d asked her for help more often but I really liked trying to troubleshoot what I was doing wrong. An experienced tech can do a whole mouth in 15-20 minutes. I’m slow. But that’s OK! This is the first time I’ve ever taken mouth dental radiographs.
The rest of my day was spent extracting teeth. I managed to take 4 out. Again, I’m slow, but the only experience I have with extractions is a lab I had for my dental elective class where I felt rushed and didn’t have enough equipment. Plus, my cadaver has pristine teeth. Based on the width of his pulp canals on x-rays, I’d estimate him to be a pretty young dog, maybe 2 years old, and he has no dental disease, so those teeth do not want to come out. I removed two lower incisors, leaving an incisor between them, to see if I could remove them without obviously damaging the remaining tooth. That went pretty well. Each tooth took probably about an hour, but I was taking my time, getting used to the feel of my dental instruments and which sizes to use for the teeth, and concentrating on using force appropriately (i.e. not fatiguing my hand or breaking roots). After those came out, I worked on an upper first premolar, the tooth that is just behind the canine tooth. That one was a little more frustrating and I stopped to have lunch in the middle of it because I was starting to feel like I wasn’t making any progress and I didn’t want to break the tooth because I was feeling impatient. After lunch I worked on that tooth another 5 minutes and it popped right out! I guess I was close but didn’t realize it :P Finally, I worked on an upper canine tooth. For those, you have to make a surgical flap in the oral mucosa over the tooth and its root. Then, you drill away the alveolar bone on the outer surface of the root until you visualize it more or less completely. These suckers are huge. The part of the tooth you see coming out of the gingiva is only about 1/3 of its total length. And, since my cadaver had perfect teeth, it did not want to come out. It was soooo satisfying when it finally did though! I kept the teeth, which I hope to clean up in the near future, but I want to show you guys how cool this is, so I found some non-gross pictures on the internet.
If you think they’ll upset you, just skip the 2 pictures below, though they really aren’t bloody or gross. There are more words after them.
This is what kind of hole that tooth leaves once extracted:
In a live patient, you would smooth the bone around the hole and suture your surgical flap in place over the defect.
Here are some more or less cleaned off teeth.
Isn’t it amazing how long those roots are? The ones on either end are the canines and from where that little bump pointing towards the middle of the picture and up is the crown of the tooth. All the rest is root. They’re huge! The other teeth are incisors with their own ridiculously long roots.
In other non-tooth related news, I’m anxious. I think it’s building up in anticipation for my Surgery rotation. I am not looking forward to this rotation at all. I’ve heard from a number of students that it’s a pretty miserable rotation. You have to deal with the surgeons’ crazy big egos, not knowing anything about the surgeries that are being performed (they’re specialists so they mostly do surgeries that general practitioners can’t do), and very little sleep. I know it’s only 2 weeks but it sounds so awful. I wish it was a rotation where we’d be learning how to do surgeries that we might actually be performing in real life instead of watching ones that pretty much only board certified surgeons do. Bleh.
Yesterday I found a skirt I could wear for job interviews that was a bargain. I think it triggered some serious anxiety surrounding job hunting and working in general. I haven’t done anything with my resume yet, despite telling myself I would try to by now, because the thought of doing so puts me in an anxiety freeze. The idea of applying for jobs and interviewing is scary, but I think the idea of actually getting and maintaining a job is even scarier. I don’t feel like I know anywhere near enough to be a good doctor. Then the thoughts about maybe not being smart enough or that I’m unable to retain enough information to be good at this start and it’s all downhill from there. Sometimes I really wish my anxiety had an “Off” button.
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