what a week of stress. i'm so exhausted right now - i've never felt more weirded out and blank-minded than i do right now. so here goes my debriefing. bear with me, it's therapeutic for me, and when you do see me during march break, i'll be in a much better frame of mind, i promise.

anyway, oral path midterm. a stack of sheets to memorize, cysts and lesions up to here, histology and associated pathology etc etc up to there - and while it would be nice to learn it, all i did was memorize, but then my brain was so tired, that i knew all the stuff at the beginning of the packages really well, but then teetered off towards the last pages of each package, and thus, i probably knew everything in a precursory way, had fully memorized maybe 3/4 of it, and the last 1/4, well, it was sort of at my fingertips, slowly slipping away, especially the morning of the test, when my brain was so tired and defunct that i could barely remember anything. anyway, it was just my luck that the midterm wasn't as demanding of me as i expected (and expected to fail), and soon, it was done.

then, an afternoon of endo. endo, well, it can be excrutiatingly frustrating, and then at the same time, relaxing. its relaxing at the moment because we're working on teeth that are not encased in a real live mouth - they're right in front of us, and there's no way of hurting a real person...the teeth are extracted teeth. anyway, its relaxing because endo consists of taking these steel or titanium "files" up and down the canals of teeth, and so its rather rhythmical, but today, it was just a basket of stress. endo is apparently an exact science of measuring the lengths of root canals, but all i see is potential for error at every step, and a lot of eye-balling-pin-pointing estimation, mostly cause canals curve and files come out of the curve at an angle, and i end up with old teeth with stained reparative dentin and tiny canals. i've only really done 2 or 3 "root canals", if you can call them that at this point, and in retrospect, i suppose the more trouble i get into, the more i learn, but when the buck stops at "hand in your radiographs by 5 pm!", it is more difficult to take your time with learning. sigh...i need an endo tutor or something.

okay, time to sleep, one full night's worth, at last.