kanye west now

so, we know i'm sort of obsessed with lil wayne's grill..

 and now kanye west has joined the club.  evidently, he had some extensive dental work done after an accident in 2002 that broke his jaw and required him to be wired together.   somehow, someone got hold of his panoramic xray, taken while he was wired together:

 now, what i see is that kanye had ortho at some point, probably in his childhood (they extracted 4 permanent premolars....a favorite treatment by some orthodontists that drives me crazy b/c it usually leaves patients w/ a flat mid-facial profile, but i digress, as usual).  it looks like he may have had some trauma to the lowers and he had to wear a lower splint:

 see?  even kanye got a little flat-faced from those premolar extractions..makes the mouth turn down.  sigh.

unfortunately, the photos of his new grill are all fuzzy.  it looks like they did work on the lower six anterior teeth, but i can't tell exactly what was done, but it looks like they're all splinted together like lil wayne's

here's the video of him discussing it on ellen:  they really do sparkle!



and i STILL haven't found anyone to let me do a simple diamond implant in a canine. i must be seeing the wrong patients....

kickboxing

as i've mentioned before, i started working out w/ raymond 'desade' desmarais several months ago to help the chronic back pain  from which i'd suffered--upper back from 15 years of doing dentistry, lower back from 3 yrs of picking up kids.  well, he knocked the pain out in a few weeks like he was swatting a fly, then he got serious about kicking my butt.  we started w/ weight lifting.  then he brought some pads in and let me kick him a few times at the end of a workout.  then he got me some gloves so i could hit him a little.  then he put it together and let me kick AND hit him.....and it's AMAZING. 

i had luc come yesterday to videotape some.  these are just some practice workouts.  the really fun ones are 2-3 minute timed rounds.

it's interesting for me to see the workout from this perspective.  i always thought i hit like rocky, but instead, i hit more like bullwinkle....if bullwinkle were a girl.  and maybe really, really tired.  in my defense, this was after a 45 minute workout.  and i'd worked all day.  and i'm pretty sure i had a papercut.  sigh.  i gotta work on my form.

daniel schorr died today and symmetry

i've always had a special place in my heart for daniel schorr b/c of the obvious similarities in our names...and the fact that we both have had to go through life correcting people who try to spell it intuitively.  him, shore, me schmoor.

i knew daniel schorr as a commentator for npr, not knowing that he was already in his 70's when first heard him on public radio in the 80's.  he was 93 when he died today, his advanced age never evident in his voice.  i had no clue he was that old and assumed he'd be around as long as me.  didn't i just hear him on npr this week?

what i've learned about him today:  he's been a journalist and correspondent for almost 65 years now.  he conducted the first ever tv interview with nikita khruschev in 1957.  he was number 17 of 20 on richard nixon's "enemies list"; a fact he discovered while reading the list live on-air.   in 1976, he made public a suppressed report on illegal cia and fbi 'findings' and to this day, he has not revealed his source.  he's been a staunch advocate for first amendment rights his whole career.

less auspiciously, he was born august 31, 1916, so he and i not only share similar names, we share our birthday (i'm aug 31, 1964.  if you have any interest in chinese astrology, you'd know that we were both born in 'dragon' years.  i think all this means that we both have a knack for occasionally pissing off the wrong people b/c of our beliefs and/or behavior).  the schorr's are ukranian-jew, he was born in the bronx.  the schmorr's are prussian-jew, my dad born in the bronx.

sigh.  i'm just really going to miss his voice.

my laser rocks

this is really only going to be interesting to people either in the dental field.  not for the faint of heart, but it's so cool!

this lady came in with a traumatic cyst the size of a marble!!  i've never seen one even half this size before!  she bit her lip, it swelled, causing her to accidentally bite it more, causing more swelling, etc etc.  you see these pretty often, same location, but they're usually the size of a bb.

 so i got her numb and lasered it.  it was sort of a surprise assault, but she did great!  here's immediately after--it's amazing!

here's one day later.  she has a little residual swelling, but the tissue looks great.  it's hard to believe i took a marble out of her lip yesterday.  AND it doesn't hurt.  little to no post-op pain.  lasers are crazy magic.

a new diagnosis: SUIT

this was forwarded to me by a friend several months ago and is one of the funniest things on the internet. jolene roxbury is a southern comedienne who does characters based on her bayou relatives.

fwiw, this is probably more of a chick thing than a guy thing, but i think it's relevant for this blog since SUIT (somthin' up in there) is now a commonly used diagnostic term in our office.

it's all audio...no video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ-XhuFSQFs

total dorks

a conversation we had in the office yesterday:

kassie's got a patient in the chair whose wife is a toxicologist.  he asks about a stuffed creature she keeps on a shelf (it's supposed to be a 'halitosis bug') and mentions that he got one for his wife once; it's a bacterium or a spore or something.

i say:  'spores are amazing things.  they're going to take over the world someday b/c they're so hard to kill.'
kassie, unconvinced, says:  'well, maybe, but i'm not going to hold my breath'
i say:  'you'd better if there's a spore around'.

yukyukyuk.  we just can't help ourselves.


another conversation....'rent a liberal':

last week, we have a patient, also in kassie's room.  she's a teacher at a local minority college; very cool, very hip, looooong dreadlocks, flowing shirts and skirts.  we were discussing our mutual love for indian food.  she said she'd like to go to india and be a serial wedding crasher just to try out all the buffets, which i thought was a GREAT idea.  then we figured a way to do it for profit.  if an indian couple wanted to diversify their guest list and show how progressive they are, they could hire us as a biracial, middle-aged, lesbian couple, thus covering a lot of bases in a relatively small, discounted package.  we'd call our business 'rent-a-liberal'. 

i love our patients....

personal training

i've been in pretty good shape most of my life; exercise has ALWAYS been a part of my regular routine.  then at 42, i got pregnant....with a litter of two.

but, ohhhh, i was going to be one of those women who exercised right up until the day they give birth.  you know the ones i'm talking about of course.  but then, at around say, 4 or 5 months into it, i was taking a ballet class (with righteous optimism, i'd bought a pre-paid card of 20 classes), and had already accepted that jumps weren't going to happen anymore, was at the barre, doing a port de bras (french for 'leaning backwards w/ your arm in the air') and realized i was stopped, by my belly, from going back more than 5 degrees from vertical.  yeesh.  fine.  FINE.   so there are other exercises.  i can always walk.

but no one told me about the hip issue.  45 extra pounds sitting on top of 42 yr old hips doesn't make for a walk in the park.  or up the hill.  my office is one block from armadillo grill, a regular on our lunch circuit.  at about 7 months into the pregnancy, i realized i couldn't walk the 300 ft, even with nachos as an incentive, so while my staff all strolled down the street, i drove my, sigh, minivan the block down to the restaurant and back.

by month 8, it was starting to look they would have to wheel me from room to room to see patients.  fortunately, i went into labor before it got that bad.

ok, so my plan was start exercising as soon as the babies were born, right?  yeah, right.  i always scoffed at those stay at home moms who complained that they didn't get dressed until four in the afternoon b/c they were so busy, then i discovered that dressing by four was a day of over-achievement.

three-plus years of over-using a couple of weird muscles to do dentistry and pick up kids and not exercising the other 98% of them has led to chronic pain and muscle spasms.  now that the boys are somewhat self-entertaining, i've been able to commit to a little gym time.  one of my patients, it turns out, is a personal trainer who works out of a gym a few blocks from the office.  his name is raymond desmarais aka the marquis de sade (french for 'you want me to lift what?!?  how many times?!?).  however, for all my whining, the improvement is amazing.  it was about 2 weeks into it that i realized i wasn't in pain anymore.  not just not sore from the workouts, but no neck/back/shoulder pain. yippeee!

raymond's still the devil though.