Okay so basically all I have left is the clinical board, this is soooo crazy! This week I am sharpening my instruments and getting everything organized and ready to go for the big day. I just wish it was like this week, I am ready to just do it.

Wow! Thursday was my last day of clinic for forever! It was sad and exciting. I can't believe that I am almost done with this program. It seriously has gone by so fast. I can remember the first day of clinic.
So for today I had my board patient come in to just do a quick check and then my little brother came in. He came up from california and I was really excited to clean his teeth. He smokes and I keep trying to get him to quite. I need to print off more literature on tobbacco cessation that I can give to him. In the afternoon I went for about an 1 1/2 hours to the women's health connection to help do screenings. We found a few potential board patients and sent them up to Weber! It was weird to have that be the very last day of clinic. It does not feel real.

Last Thursday in clinic Hollie and I cleaned each other's teeth in the morning! That was fun, it reminded me of being in first year clinic! She also used the nitrous on me. It's always a good experience to be remineded what it's like to be the patient. I think it really helps to understand and gives you a better perspective when you are treating patients. Hollie did awesome, of course!
In the afternoon I saw a patient that I have been I able to have come for perio maintainence three times this year. Most of the time we don't see our patient again when the treatment is completed so this was great to be able to track his progress at each appointment.

I finished my mentoring project today. It was really interesting to go to a real office. I am nervous to go out into the real world because everything is so much faster and billing I think will be a challenge at first. This experience really helped for me to see what I will be doing and will help so I don't go into it completely blind. This month I have been trying to get faster and pretend like I was in a realy office. A couple of weeks ago I saw two 1b's in the same appointment and that was a great experience. I was nervous to do it, but I did it and it worked out great! My goal for the last two days of clinic is to work quickly and try to stay on schedule for what a real office would be like.

Yesterday I had mock board and it went really well! I used my board patient and cleaned his upper left quad. I decided to save one tooth out of that quad for boards as an alternate submission. I didn't miss any spots, except for the tooth that I did not clean!! Hopefully I can do that same thing on the real board in a few weeks. I feel like I have gotten a lot better at feeling for calculus and removing it. When I first started scaling I never picked up an explorer, but just hoped that I had done a good job. Now I always use it even on the easy patients. On easy patients I always check the mandibular anteriors especially. The one thing on the mockboard that I missed was a couple of probe depths. I was in a huge hurry because he had his little boy there and had to keep taking breaks, so I probed way fast. On the real board I need to really take my time to get those one hundred percent right.

Last week was the Anesthesia board. I have never been so nervous to take an exam in my life. I studied like crazy for it because I heard that it was very hard. It was such a relief to pass and after the written I felt a huge surge of relief. I was not as nervous for the clinical portion because I knew that if I didn't pass I could still redo it. The board examiners were great, very nice. I passed both and it felt wonderful. I think that it is smart to study on your own and then also in a group to recement things and everyone always picks up something different to contribute. My next hurdle is the Written board and that will be sooooo nice to have over. I am studying like crazy for that now.