Hamlin House - nice historic house that used to be occupied by Hannibal Hamlin, vice president to Abraham Lincoln. It's about a 5 minute drive to the clinic, which is very convenient.
Kitchen.
TV room.
Somehow I got stuck in the smallest room in the house. Most rooms have two beds. We share the house with other dental and medical students.
This is where we work:
Gabe in his operatory. We get assigned an operatory and we get our own assistant as well. It's incredibly nice not having to set up for each patient or clean up after yourself or suction for your own MOD #14 amalgam preps.
Break room - a place to chill during down time. Free coffee, tea, and hot chocolate makes it nicer. Clinic runs from 7:30am to 6pm, which would seem like long hours, but it goes by pretty quickly for the most part.
And this is where we play:
Beehive hike at Acadia National Park. That's my roommate - a 3rd year dental student from Tufts.
Lobster at a lobster shack near Bar Harbor.
Baxter State Park, climbing Mt. Katahdin, the highest point of Maine.
At the top of Mt. Katahdin - also the northernmost point of the Appalachian Trail.
Chimney Pond in Baxter State Park.
Gabe enjoying the weather and ice cream at Bar Harbor.
Life is good in Maine - weather is perfect, people are nice, scenery is beautiful, seafood is delicious. Clinic has been nice as well - we're given a lot more freedom and it feels more like "real-life" dentistry. We see about 5-6 patients a day with mostly fillings, extractions, and some endo. It's made me appreciate how well UNC has prepared us up to this point - particularly after talking to some of the other externs here from Tufts and Boston University. They get into clinic a lot later than we do and it just seems as if they're a little less confident seeing and treating patients at this point than we are. Well, except for endo - I feel like we're taught a lot of endo "knowledge" but I feel very limited in my ability to do much endo. It seems like having most everything referred to grad endo has sheltered us from knowing how to deal with harder cases (which I had to do here.. ended up breaking a file in a patient's tooth, but that's another story.. at least I diagnosed her correctly, right?). Also, dealing with the pedo patients here have humbled Gabe and I. Gabe has had some rough bouts with pedo, an example being today when he had to restore two teeth in a patient who refused to sit still. He ended up having to do a pulpotomy and place an amalgam (after multiple tries) in this patient while restraining himself from choking her - I think she was close to biting his fingers off and eating up the rubber dam. I have had some tough pedo patients that I didn't really know how to deal with as well. But maybe that's just because of our personalities, not due to our lack of training. The attendings are pretty good to work with - pretty hands-off (sometimes to our detriment) - and the clinic is usually pretty busy. Gabe and I have enjoyed it. It makes it hard to want to go back to school to do dentistry.
With much <3 <3 <3 from Maine to our wonderful class of 2012ers,
-Tim and Gabe
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