I’ve just re-added the moon tracker module to the sidebar on the right (it was on the original version of the blog). My front desk staff puts all full moons for the year into the appointment book because of the wackiness that happens around those times. The last full moon and lunar eclipse was an especially crazy time. Don’t know if it’s because of me, or the patients, or a combination of both.

This last week started out on an abjectly depressing note for me. Some major (almost catastrophic) family issues caused me to really withdraw into myself. Things have slowly been resolving and through the support of my wife, my brother and his wife I’m almost back to myself again. Thankfully my patients didn’t suffer too much.

I now know who does and should matter most to me in this short life that we live.

I’ve always maintained that blogging is a therapeutic exercise for me. Although through my comments this week you’ve probably had no inclination of what I was going through, my blog and its readers have been an anchor of sanity for me.

Thank you all.

It’s not usually a good thing when your dentist says “oops” during a procedure. I’m sure that the dentist who did this didn’t say “oops” out loud, but instead thought something much more profane when he saw what he had done.

The patient has been experiencing episodic symptoms for almost a year (since the implant was done). The periodontist who did the implants bounced the patient to an endodontist and an oral surgeon. Nobody really wanted to do anything. A CT scan was ordered by the oral surgeon and, although results were not conclusive, there were findings consistent with the fact that the implant was in contact with the root of the tooth. It was difficult to determine if the canal space had been perforated.

The patient was eventually referred to me for a second endodontic opinion. I recommended exploratory access and a retreatment start. The film above shows the story after I had accessed the crown, cleared gutta-percha from the canal, and then loaded the canal up with Calcium Hydroxide paste. The plan was to leave the tooth in this state for at least 4 weeks to see if symptoms improved.

During instrumentation of the canal, I found a solid, wide blockage in the apical 1/3 of the canal but fairly short of where the root should have ended. Electronic apex locator readings showed an apex at this blockage. These finding are consistent with the blockage being a metallic object that had perforated the root.

Over the past few weeks our patient has not noticed any significant relief from the current treatment. This means that completion of the retreatment will make no difference either. I’m not interested in doing apical surgery around an implant, so back he goes to his periodontist for further direction.

Solitary Penguin has returned to the blogosphere after a prolonged absence. She has a good reason to have been away–her newly-bought practice has been causing her grief. facebook has probably gotten in the way too.

Before EntreCard, I had about 6 regular readers and only a few blogs that I felt personally interested in. Don’t get me wrong–I read quite a few blogs, but there were only a handful that I felt compelled to comment on. This was after almost a couple of years of blogging. I’ve never read anyone’s blog in its entirety.

After reading her last post I felt the urge to go backwards through her blog, or even start at the beginning and travel…but then I pictured myself doing that and felt like a stalker. So I didn’t.

Isn’t that strange?

I’ve finally finished editing our video of our St. Lucia vacation over the week of Christmas.

As you know, I started my blog on blogger.com and then moved it over to a WordPress system. When I was blogging on Blogger I sometimes used to click on their top toolbar to jump to a random blog to find something interesting to read. Through this method I never really found anything interesting enough to add to my RSS aggregator (at that time Bloglines, now Google Reader). In fact, I found many splogs that wasted my time.

I ended up mostly reading blogs that I fell into via Google’s Blogsearch or via comments to my blog. The novelty of facebook led to a decline in the quantity of posts to my blog for some time. However, as the facebook help page (shown above) says, I am a Blogger…

Through facebook, I found a university friend of mine and discovered his blog. Through his blog I found EntreCard. Through EntreCard I have found a repository of quality, well-maintained blogs.

EntreCard’s website has more information for you if you’re interested. You should be interested in EntreCard if you’re a blogger who is on the lookout for other interesting blogs to read and you want to increase your blog’s exposure to others that are also looking for interesting blogs to read. It’s really that simple.

Most people using the EntreCard system use it to try to increase visitors to their blog in order to expose their in-blog advertisements to a larger audience. This is definitely a legitimate use of EntreCard but has been the source of debate about its effectiveness for monetization.

I see EntreCard as the most effective blogging social network system out there right now. Thanks for the recommentation Rudy!

With all of the blogs that I was now subscribed to, keeping track of conversational threads in posts’ comments started becoming problematic for me. If the blog had no option to email me future comments related to the post, I would have to subscribe to the comment feed of the blog. All of this required a few steps that ended up being time consuming. Maintaining these comment feed subscriptions started to become unwieldly in my reader because there were so many of them and they wouldn’t be relevant after a certain amount of time.

Thanks to Lin, another EntreCard user, I found a more elegant solution. Although still in testing, CoComment is a comment aggregator that itself has a feed that my feed aggregator can read. Now I can keep up with comment threads easily.

Because all of this blog hopping has drawn my blog into more of a social blog network than it used to be, I’m tending to spend more time these days in the blogosphere than in facebook. I wanted to find a way to put facebook’s status update system on my blog so that I could still keep track of my fb friends. In order to try to maintain some level of protection of my super-secret identity on my blog, I had to use Feedburner to massage my facebook friends’ RSS status update feed before it could be posted on the blog (so that the feed doesn’t show my real name). Really, really, industrious and motivated individuals will likely still be able to discover my real identity, but you deserve to know it if you go to all that trouble.

Because my blogroll is now so long, it made more sense for me to find a way to show recent posts from the blogroll rather than links to the blogs themselves. So now recent blogroll posts are shown on my blog via a script courtesy of Google Reader. Blogs that show on here are just a handful of the total number of blogs that I’m subscribed to. I choose which ones get to show up based on a number of factors: Frequency of posting (blogs that post tons of material a day don’t go on here because I want to try to have a fair distribution of posts from other blogs), if you comment on my blog there’s a good chance your blog will get added to the list, and most importantly, blogs that represent topics I find most interesting show up on here. Oh, and obviously your blog needs to have a valid syndication feed.

Finally, there’s the “Current Context” headline at the top of the blog. This is from a WordPress plugin that reads the status from Twitter. My Twitter updates get picked up on the blog and also by a facebook app that then updates my facebook status and keeps the two in sync. As far as I know, there are 2 facebook apps related to Twitter. Rudy uses the “official” one and I use the second which I like better because it doesn’t automatically prepend stuff to my update.

Now if anyone finds a plugin that will vacuum the house, wash the dishes, cook dinner, and shovel the driveway please let me know. The Girl is on a continuing education course all weekend and is just home at night so I have a good-sized TODO list to work on.

Blogging isn’t on the list.