Dental Internship Stories: Part 6

Very chill day today. Thursdays are the days when I go to the other office that my dad owns, and that means more shadowing! Shadowing, in my opinion, is the best part of internship, as I get to physically observe the job that I want to do in the future. I shadowed both my dad and the other dentist, doing a lot of it in the morning. I watched the usual fillings, crown preps, and crown cements, but I also got to watch an extraction. It was for a younger kid, who was super nervous. But it went by easily enough, and the kid didn't act up. What caught my attention was how the entire tooth, roots and all, just popped out of the gums. I never knew that was how extractions worked, but I also got to watch someone get their tooth pulled out either (my dad would just pull out my teeth for me at home). That was pretty interesting. Also, my dad did a root canal for a patient (that I did not observe), and he managed to pull out the entire nerve in the tooth as one piece. What caught my attention was how the nerve was white! I never knew that; I assumed they were green like the pictures in the science textbooks.

Other than that, I worked on my college essay, finally bringing it back down to 650 words. So glad I didn't need to work on the research project today, as that is becoming a nightmare (not really, just exaggerating there). As for an update on the research project, we decided to go through with our original plan as we figured out how to work around the issue. Now we need to research even more dental offices, and that's going to be a grind. But I'll save that for tomorrow.