Home away from home

Greetings from Arizona! We're at the ASDA annual meeting in Scottsdale, Az, and will be staying here until Sunday. So far we've managed to keep it under the radar that Jordan and Melissa are here with me and we're having a pretty good time, but maybe check with Melissa's blog in a few days for her side of the story.

Magnetic cows!

I don't know if you guys ever click on the Benjiblog section titled "Always Interesting" down and to the right of here, but this morning's edition of 60-second science was pretty awesome. German researchers found out that cattle and deer have built-in compasses and have a tendency to face magnetic north or south when grazing or resting. The current hypothesis is that this keeps them oriented so they have their bearings in case predators attack and they have to make a sudden "moooooooooove". (That joke was shamelessly stolen directly from the podcast).
Crazy German researchers..... what will they discover next?

How many houses do we own?

In light of John McCain's recent failure to answer how many houses he owns, I conducted a little poll among my family members to see if they knew how many we own. Melissa (my wife) got the answer right by answering "zero". Jordan, however, totally made a fool of himself by answering "choo-choo". Not even close buddy.

Tales from the clinic floor

Today was rough. Next time you have a dental appointment and maybe you're not really looking forward to it, just think to yourself, "at least it's not an 8-hour appointment."

That's right, today's patient drives from far away so to keep his trips back and forth to a minimum (insert token gas-prices complaint here) we decided it would be a good idea to book him for my morning and afternoon sessions. I prepped three teeth for crowns and tried (and failed) to have that be my bridge competency required for graduation. When attempting a competency, I do all the steps without help and then have two faculty members grade my work. Things kept going wrong and I seriously think I made about 20 temporary crowns before I had three that worked and I was happy with. Ugh.

Anyway, since I'm on the topic of dentistry, here's three amusing stories that happened to me lately:

Sidewalk
A couple weeks back I was getting ready to place a space-maintainer in the mouth of a really curious seven-year-old. He had been asking questions all along and I was happy to answer them, but he really threw me for a loop when he asked why I was going to put sidewalk in his mouth. Sidewalk? I was so confused - then I remembered that I had told him the next step was to "cement" the space maintainer onto his molar. It's funny how kids think sometimes.

Ipod
A couple weeks back we had mock-board exams and were required to find a patient had a specific type of cavity - a class II lesion if you were wondering. The week before the exam I was doing a pediatric rotation and came across a 13-year old with the perfect class II lesion. I convinced her and her mom to help me out but was a little concerned about whether the patient's attention span could last the whole 4-hour exam, so I told her I'd bring my video Ipod and she could watch stuff while I worked.
When exam time came I had her take a seat while I finished setting up and she started watching the Andy Milonakis Show and some stand-up comedy. The resulting scene was pretty funny - to appreciate it you have to picture the tense exam atmosphere with 100 dental chairs and hardly anybody talking. Except for a few dental drills whistling in the distance, everything is silent. Then you have this loud teenage girly giggling happening like clockwork every 20 seconds coming from cubicle 74. Soon people started turning their heads trying to figure out what was going on. All I could do was shrug my shoulders and say, "Hey, I'm that good."

What's that smell?
Working on a crown competency last week, I determined that I needed to do a minor electro-surgery on the patient's gums. To do this, there's a machine you plug in and have the patient hold a metal plate, and when the end of the handpiece makes contact with the tissue it completes the circuit and basically fries the tissue. (Keep in mind the patient is numb so it's really not that bad). After doing this for a minute I explained to the patient (who grew up in El Salvador) that I was using the high volume suction so that it didn't stink. Having already caught a whiff of his own crispy gums, he smiled and told me he thought it smelled like carne asada. I told him it sort of was.

Sorry this post was all words and no pictures! I never read posts like that. Here's a totally awesome picture to try to get you to read:


(click for the bigger, more awesome version)

Puffer fish underwent an emergency dental procedure after a fight with a stingray

Crazy as it sounds, I'm not making this up. It happened in England. Here is the full story. It sounds like the fight busted off part of a tooth, which in and of itself would have been ok, except that puffer fish are like rats in that they need to constantly be gnawing to keep their teeth worn down. After the fight the lazy puffer fish did all his gnawing on the side with the broken tooth, allowing his other tooth to grow to the point that it started damaging his lip.

Crazy.

After the procedure the fish was relocated to Germany - I'd like to think that it was part of some sort of fish witness protection program to keep him safe from the sting rays.

What do you call a nun who sleepwalks?

A roamin' catholic.

Today was the first time in a long time that I actually laughed at a laffy-taffy joke. Then I got to thinking - it's been a while since I've heard any new jokes. Please, help update my arsenal of jokes by leaving a comment with a good joke.

Jordan's Epiglottis

Ever wonder how babies can drink and breath at the same time? Think about it - you can't drink and breath at the same time (try it if you don't believe me), and nursing babies don't come up for air once they "latch on".

I was studying this very concept for my board exams just over a year ago, at the same time baby Jordan was just a wee infant. The answer lies in the epiglottis. Here is an illustration of the epiglottis of an infant:
The key difference is that the shape of the baby's throat allows the epiglottis (the green shaded area) to come into contact with the soft palate (yellow), thus allowing air (shown in light blue) to enter the trachea, while milk (shown in pink) can flow around on either side.

I was recently reminded of this concept during our summer break at my parent's house when Jordan was drinking from a sippy cup and started coughing. I looked at him and asked if he got some down the wrong pipe and then realized that this had never happened to him before. I realized my little boy is growing up - his epiglottis is no longer touching his soft palate when he drinks! He'll just have to alternate between drinking and breathing just like the rest of us now. I think this is a milestone in toddlers lives that most parents are unaware of.

Garfield minus Garfield

If you haven't heard of this yet, I highly recommend checking out this site. It's a simple premise - any talking animals are removed from the comic strip, resulting in Jon Arbuckle appearing extremely lonely and crazy.

The website's self description:

Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.

It took a minute for me to start thinking it was funny. In fact, some of them are just outright sad, but the more I read it the more I laughed and by about 10 minutes in I was laughing so hard I was crying! Then it kind of wore off a little. I think it adds to the effect to read it all at once.

Recently, Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, gave his permission for the creator of the site to publish a Garfield minus Garfield book.

Speaking of disasters

Which Natural Disaster is the Worst?

Living in southern California, we have the opportunity to experience earthquakes on a somewhat regular basis. We usually notice one every couple of months. Last week, however, we felt the biggest one yet since we've moved here. It was a 5.4 in Chino Hills which is about 30 miles away. The rumbling lasted about 5 seconds, after which I checked on Jordan who was sound asleep in his crib. I had my hands on his doorway and noticed that I could still feel my whole house gently rocking back and forth like a boat. This lasted for about a minute. Since we rent our home and don't really have any expensive possessions, I can honestly say it was a pretty cool experience.



This reminded me of a conversation I had with a faculty member at school a few weeks ago. She had mentioned not wanting to live on the east coast because of tornadoes. This struck me as odd for two reasons. First, I didn't think the east coast had tornadoes, and second, earthquakes seem much more intimidating to me, and we're right in the heart of earthquake country. This made me realize that we don't all view natural disasters the same. Since childhood, my wife has had nightmares of tornadoes and would rather take on an earthquake than a tornado any day.



So, I set out to do some research on which disasters are the deadliest and therefore warrant the most fear. This table compares the single deadliest event of each of the natural disasters. For those of you too lazy to click the link, here's the list of deadliest to least deadly:

Pandemic
Drought
Flood
Earthquake
Tropical cyclone
Tsunami
Volcano
Heat wave
Landslide
Blizzard
Wildfire
Limnic Eruption
Tornado
Hailstorm
Avalanche

However, I don't think there necessarily needs to be a correlation between "deadliest" and "scariest". Even though the worst avalanche has killed a mere 96 people, that doesn't detract from the terror an approaching avalanche would instill.

So, I urge you to cast your vote in my little poll to the right - which of the disasters listed do you fear most? You have 1 week to vote.



Update: Polls showed Drought running away with the title of scariest, getting twice as many votes as the 2nd place disaster. There was a 5-way tie for the #2 spot involving Earthquake, Flood, Limnic Eruption, Tornado, and Tsunami.

Here's an idea

A reality TV show where anti-death penalty protesters and inmates currently on death row are sent to live together on a deserted island. Bonus: in order to keep their behavior true to form we don't send any video cameras but instead we just send someone by after a few years to see what happened.

This idea came to while driving home from my rotation at the HIV clinic this afternoon. I was listening to these guys talk about this guy and describing the gruesome, brutal murders he committed.

Waterslideshow

Last Friday the dental school had a barbecue with a huge inflatable slide. You can probably tell from the pictures, but I had an awesome time! Jordan also thought it was kind of cool, but the last time I took a plunge he freaked out and screamed for a couple minutes. Good to know he loves me.

Melissa is a very talented photographer. One of the cool features on our spiffy new camera is the sports setting. It allows you to simply hold the shutter button down and it rapidly takes pictures, so you end up with some cool action shots.

Thanks Craig, for letting me use your list

That's right, I'm an official craigslister. Money's tight around here these days and there's a couple items I don't need. I'm trying to sell a nice toothbrush and a skateboard.