Today we got our new instruments. I felt exactly like I did the day we got the instruments last summer, overwhelmed and scared as hell. Great another year of learning the names and uses of all these new tools and what not. Just as you get used to one thing, gotta start learning about other things, no rest I tell you. Tomorrow is the first day of lab, and that means one thing: alginate and casts. Its the first thing we did in lab during D1 too. I hated it, it was worse than any wax up, insertion or preparation I had done.

I remember the first day of lab, it was utter chaos. I really thought that I should drop out of dental school, that it was totally not worth the money. The first lab is the most poorly instructed of all the labs, and it was the most confusing. Here you are, a total newbie, trying to create the perfect alginate impression of the typodont with little to no help from faculty.  You will redo the alginate so many times due to those damn air bubbles. You spend most of the 3hrs trying to get that done. Then, you get to the tough part. You have to pour dental plaster into the alginate impression to make the stone cast, then add more plaster for the base. Once all that hardens you have to trim the cast so you get proper margins and smooth flat surfaces. What a nightmare. That day I was scheduled to leave lab at 5pm and I left around 8pm. There is no one to show you how to do anything. Had it not been for D2’s, it would have never gotten done. Also, these things break so easily. I had to redo one of the arches after I chipped a tooth. Just horrible. So all you D1’s, its gonna be damn ugly in the beginning, but after that it is smooth sailing for the most part.

And tomorrow I have to do all of what I described above, and I havent done it in a year. The great thing about D1, is that you only need to do this once. In D2, we will be makng many of these casts……just great.

Oh yeah, I also learned today that something like 8 D2’s are repeating the entire year. They failed D2 classes, had to re-mediate and then failed the remediation’s. So apparently you get to repeat the year if you fail remediation. Not fun and very costly. I guess that will serve as the incentive to kick start the study machine. Ill let you guys know how lab goes tomorrow…