Some questions do not have answers

Evelyn the Dentist?

Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing to choose dentistry as my future career choice. True, everybody tells me that it is a very good profession (Office hours! Very convenient profession for a lady) and that it is lucrative (This better be true for what I'm going through now). However, when I'm stuck slaving in the pre-clinical labs trying to drill a cavity the right way and to fill it so that it looks like the original tooth again, I have second thoughts. Do I REALLY want to do this for the rest of my life? Sitting in front of patients everyday saying the words that dentists use the most often - open, wider, sit up, rinse, open? Staring into oral cavities the whole day? It doesn't help that statistics show that dentists have the highest suicide rate compared to other professions.

When I was young the idea of me becoming a dentist never once crossed my mind. My father was a doctor and my mom was a teacher. Being who they were, naturally they encouraged me to take up medicine. However, when the time came to fill in the application forms, I decided that I didn't want to become a doctor and study for the next one and a half decades before I became a fully qualified specialist. Therefore I chose the lesser (at least, so I thought) of two evils and decided on dentistry instead. I have no regrets on this matter. Doing medicine would probably have made me depressed. The thing is, perhaps I should have done something else that wasn't health science related - like commerce or something.

At the end of the second year of my course, we were given a questionaire to fill up with various very well phrased questions, such as 'Do you SERIOUSLY regret doing dentistry?' and 'Are you having any MAJOR problems with the workload?'. True, half the time during the course I was just trying not to go crazy when I couldn't do what I intended to do. Which is the ridiculous part of it all. You can visualize exactly what you're supposed to do, but when it comes to actually doing it, everything flops. Then all you can do is curse and buy another 4 dollar plastic tooth and start all over again. However, to say that I seriously regretted taking dentistry and was having major problems was a bit too dramatic. Therefore, almost everybody answered negative to those questions.

Now that the third year of my course is starting in about 2-3 weeks time, I guess I have to say that I am reasonably happy with the choice I made. I have made friends with my classmates, many of which are amazingly smart and nice people who are exceedingly friendly. Sometimes the pre-clinical labs can even be fun, especially when you finally accomplish what you had been slaving for ages over. There is no point in looking back, thinking about the what-ifs when what is right here and now is what matters the most. I can frankly say that I am not miserable in this course. Of course, there are times where I wish I just quit studying after high school but those are just temporary lapses. Therefore, I guess I did make the right choice. I realise that not many people have the privelege to do this and therefore I should make the most of it.

As long as I survive the coming labs - I will be just fine.

posted by Evelyn at 9:59 PM