Benchmark 1 - WREB boards

Many of you are probably wondering, why did we not see Pavlovich at the Spring Classic? Well, the last four days have been consumed by my dear old friend the WREB. The WREB is a third party, national testing agency that tests candidates over four days. Once a dentist passes the WREB, he is able to apply for licenceure in the affiliated states. Well, I finished my WREB yesterday.

From what I can tell, things went well; no pink slips, no yellow slips. All the dentistry I did this weekend was, from my perspective, good products. This is not to say that the weekend was not filled with drama or chaos, but then again a $1700 test is bound to stir some anxiety, right?

The weekend, on the whole for a lot of people was a shit show. Girls crying, people failing for leaving carious tooth structure behind, people breaking burs off in teeth for endo... crazy.

Now the good part...

A colleague of mine had a patient not show up on saturday. If this happens and we do not complete the exam, colleague gets to fly to Arizona and remediate the exam in June. Now, I had two patients for this exam, each having one ideal lesion in their mouth, and having a not so great lesion in their mouth. Aside- sometimes, boards automatically shuts off the reason(see above about crying) and civility from an applicant. Most people told me, why would you let our colleague work on your patient, you should look out for yourself first. Well, no one else was willing to help our colleague, and frankly kids, it was the reasonable and civil thing to do.

Now the good part...

Moral - If you do something good and altruistic in life, it has away of coming back and fucking you over.
Colleague and I both submitted our patient for acceptance on saturday. The goal was to have colleague do his filling on saturday, and me do my filling on sunday. I finished up with my saturday patient and went on a bike ride. mid-way back form my ride, colleague called (at 5:45) and said,"Pavlov, I am still here at the clinic, they just finished grading me after 45 minutes, and I have to temporize the preparation and work on it tomorrow."

"F", I thought.
Don't count on things happening the way you envision. Well, after consulting various sources, I decided to let colleague finish his filling, and me roll the dice with my back up patients, less than ideal cavity. I did not know if it would get accepted or not, but I guess that is what you get when you lend a hand...

Sunday came and went, stress city, and I finished WREB national boards. Now just 4 weeks to wait for the results.