my first filling

So today started out as a rough Monday. Mostly because last night it finally got hot enough for me to break down and turn on the air conditioning. After weekend temperatures that were mostly in the 90s, our apartment finally heated up past the point of me being able to handle it. (My roommate and I take pride in the fact that we have not had to use the furnace or the AC since October, saving what we perceive to be a lot of money on our electric bill.) Problem? Our AC does not work. Normally this would not be a big deal, especially since it is supposed to cool off a bit in the next few days. However, when I am sleep deprived and stressed about the big neuroscience exam that is tomorrow, no AC feels like THE END OF THE WORLD. And I am peeved that despite having sent a very pleasantly worded email to the housing guy at 7:30 AM (when instead I wanted to send a raging tirade about the injustices of having to study in a brand new apartment with a non-functional air conditioning unit), the AC is still not fixed. Instead, I am sitting here with every fan turned on praying to the weather gods for a breeze tonight to blow some cool air into our apartment.

In other news, we finally finished the quadrant wax-up project from "the underworld" and moved on to operative dentistry. So today, I prepped and restored my very first "cavity". We had done some class II preps before on plastic teeth. But this was the real thing. We used real teeth, put them in Dexter's mouth, sealed it off with a rubber dam, prepped the tooth as if it had a cavity, and then filled the prep with a composite restoration. If Dexter had a real cavity, I would have fixed it (and made about $200 doing it). And I thought it looked pretty decent, at least what I would call "clinically acceptable". It was kind of neat to FINALLY feel like you were working on skills that you will actually use once you get into practice. I can see the educational value of waxing teeth, but sometimes it feels like one big waste of time because I will never be waxing teeth in my practice in the future.

Lastly, I mentioned the news story about the unlicensed dentist practicing in Chicago to one of my professors that sits on the Arizona State Board of Dental Examiners (the group that monitors that dentists are practicing lawfully and can take away a dentist's license to practice if they do something wrong). Dr. S didn't seem too surprised that this kind of thing happened. (Although in the Chicago case, the Illinois Dental Board has no jurisdiction because the guy didn't have a license.) In fact, he shared a story with me about a dentist in southern Arizona a few years ago. Apparently, the dentist had trained his assistant to give injections and do operative procedures...a BIG NO-NO. She even would hold appointments with patients when he was on vacation in Europe. The two of them eventually began to have a sexual relationship. Well, things must not have been so great, because he eventually fired her. So what does a scorned woman do? She takes him to the state dental board and gets him in a whole heck of a lot of trouble. A bunch of "her" patients were brought in before the board, saying how wonderful "Dr. Kathy" was. My professor said that the dentist's lawyer just shook his head because he knew there was no way that the dentist could weasel his way out of that one. Are people really that stupid that they think they can get away with this stuff?