sad week

It has been a rough week already, and it is only Wednesday.

Monday was rough because I had to leave Illinois after a wonderful weekend at home.  (The froyo that we got on the way home from the airport helped though.)

Yesterday was a disaster.  I am too much of a perfectionist and get frustrated when I can't do something right.  I get even more frustrated when I can't useful help from my faculty regarding my preps.  I get very frustrated when I spend an entire afternoon in the sim clinic and don't make any progress on any of the 7 projects that are due in the next day or two.  When I get frustrated, I cry.  I feel embarrassed when I cry in sim clinic, especially when my classmates and the professor see it happen.  I feel better when I see other people crying too.  Apparently dental school makes people cry.

Today was a sad day.  It was "sac" day (aka sacrifice day).  The rats are no more.  I managed to escape seeing the worst part, as I had class from 8AM to 4PM today while the lab techs and professors were doing the majority of the work.  By the time I reached the lab at 4:15PM, the hard part was done.  I stuck around for a few hours to help clean bones.  It hasn't quite sunk in yet that there are no longer 25 little furry friends waiting to run on treadmills.  Since class started last week, I have been pretty removed from the rats.  I only stopped in 2 times to run the few that were misbehaving, and hadn't seen them since Friday.  Even though there was a little bit of gruesome evidence of what had happened earlier in the day, I did not have to see their dead bodies (which is a relief).  Once clean, the bones went into labelled containers. Even though I knew I was holding the femur for "OVX Veh Run 100", it didn't seem real that this bone belonged to the rat that liked to climb out of the treadmill and would escape when I wasn't looking.  Or when I cleaned the tibia of "OVX Veh Run 104" I couldn't believe that I was holding the bone of the rat that tried to bite half of the lab staff, but loved to be petted by me.  Hopefully the distance I feel will stay for the rest of the project.  It would be nice if it never fully sinks in that the tissues I am analyzing or the hearts I am crushing or the bones I am measuring once belonged to the rats that I spent so much time with this summer.

Also, hopefully this week will improve.

PS- I promise to try and post an update about the end of my summer this weekend.  I know it will take a few hours.  Until I take my radiology exam on Friday, studying takes precedence.