Semester Wind-down

Believe it or not, as the semester winds down, we just found out our grades for our first practical in our fixed prosth class. Crazy, right? Yeah, I thought you'd agree. So here's the story. We prepped a bridge in late Sept or early Oct. I thought I did ok minus some damage to an adjacent tooth - something that will improve over time and with REAL teeth. A month passes. This Monday they show ppt slides of practicals that were good/decent and practicals that were, well, failures to be exact. Remember that tooth damage thing? Well, one of those failures had pretty much the exact same damage as mine. And the preps showed signs that their maker struggled with similar issues that I struggled with. Torture! Plain torture! So I spent the week preparing my mind and heart for a possible disappointment come 5pm today. They told us Monday, that if you fail, you will have to redo the preps and they will give you 2 teeth in your box to do so. So a lot of us said we were just hoping to open our boxes and find no extra teeth inside and all would be good.

So today was a long day. I worked really hard all during fixed this afternoon and I'm slowly getting caught up (post the removable drama). When 4:00 rolled around, I started getting knots in my stomach. I kept working right up until 5:00 and went to get my box - the death march. I walked past numerous people pouring over the comments made on their projects, dreading what I would find. I got my key, opened my project locker, pulled out my box and walked back in the lab. I opened the lid, pulled back the flaps, and there was a tooth sitting at the bottom of my box. No, there were 2 teeth. Wait! Four teeth? What? Are you kidding me? My heart sank. Why would I have to do the preps twice? Were they that bad? I didn't even want to look at the paper. I pulled out my typodonts and looked at my preps. They really weren't that bad. What is going on here? Utter disappointment. But a bit of a peace because I spent so much time preparing myself with Truth so I wouldn't let it get to me.

So I pulled out the paper and looked for the grades at the bottom. 87 and 86? Why are there teeth in my box? Oh. The teeth would be taped to my paper if I had to redo them. Not just floating around in the bottom of the box. Oh! Huh. So the picture in the slides wasn't a picture of my teeth. Oh. Ok.

I never really got excited about it, just relieved. I shall not want. Just ready to put all this behind me. Never mind that we just turned in waxing practicals that we won't get back until mid-Decemberish.