plaque city!

This morning I had a lovely lady who is also in my ward. She has had bone loss before and she has a lot of crowns (every tooth except her lower anteriors). So she doesn't get a lot of calculus, but she had a ton of plaque. She told me that she had a tooth that was bothering her, but she didn't want to take an xray because she didn't want to spend the time. To me it looked like a loose crown and I stayed away from it because I didn't want to disrupt it. When Prof. Perry came over he looked at it and he thought it was probably loose from bone loss. So I was able to take a PA for her to take with her to her dentist. Bone loss is so crazy to me, the bone had completely shrunk away from that one tooth. She doesn't have disease in that area. I feel bad that she will probably loose that tooth.
My afternoon was pure craziness. I had 2 kids scheduled and they were 9 and 10 years old. I have worked on their mom before and she wanted to get her 2 boys in.

Good things about afternoon appointment:

1. Got to get 2 sets of bitewings

2. Was able to help Karen out with a pano

3. Passed off sealant and air/powder polish PE

4. Really able to get into OHI with young boys

Bad things about afternoon appointments:

1. Boy #1 was a crazy wiggle worm! Couldn't keep still for the life of him.

2. Completely forgot to show my instructor my xrays before my patients left (bad Michelle, but not as bad as when Adrienne sends her pt away without getting a scale check)

3. Took a lot more time then I expected

4. Wasn't able to complete the sealants on Boy #1 because he started crying thinking that I was shoving things down his throat and he was pulling my hands out of him mouth when there was etch all over his teeth.

All in all the good outweighed the bad, but I was still stressed because of how long everything took and because I was in clinic until after 5 o'clock today.

Another major stresser is class III's....WHERE ARE YOU! I feel like almost everyone in our class is struggling with finding class III's. Prof. Alexander just smiles and says everything will work out, and my brain trusts her, but my emotional side is still freakin out. 

Good luck fellow students in our search for those elusive class III's!

A breath of fresh air

I am finally feeling like I have my mojo back ( as Kelsey would say). I felt pretty down and out the past few weeks and I felt like I just wasn't doing well with any of my work. I felt like my school work wasn't as good and my clinic abilities were just out of funk. But today I felt like they were back on! I completed my mockboard patient this morning. She is the sweetest lady and she is so dependable and so nice. I was able to give her anesthesia and it was awesome! I love to work on patients with anesthesia because I feel like I can really get in there and clean without worrying about when they flinch. I would rather they flinch at the beginning for a minute and then it goes away. My favorite part of this morning was being able to see the health of the tissues in the area I have already been in. They looked so much better!!! I appreciated seeing this because I feel like when she leaves her tissues are so irritated from me being in those pockets, but after a few weeks of healing and rinsing with Listerine and doing better home care, her tissues looked amazing! Just one of those feel good moments! I was also able to pass off my ultrasonic PE with Instructor Perry, I like the way he quizzes us when he does the PE's because it helps to make sure we really understand why we do the things we do.
My second patient of the day canceled and this is the second time she has canceled on the day of treatment, so that is her last chance. I am not going to reschedule cancelers. But I was able to fill my afternoon with this really nice girl that goes to Weber State and I was able to get xrays and do my caries risk assessment PE. She had crazy amounts of saliva! I was actually pretty jealous. No wonder she only has a few fillings and not really any calculus at all! Go girl!

Mockboard #1

What a great learning experience I had today. First of all I am SUPER grateful that my wonderful patient showed up. She is so reliable and I just wanted to hug her when she walked in the door. Here are some things I learned from mockboards:

1. Try sitting in different positions not only for scaling, but also for exploring. I was amazed at how different deposits felt when I moved positions and tried different tactics. Too bad it didn't help get every single piece off though...

2. Some patients are just bleeders. I felt like I spent half of my scale time washing my patient out because there was so much blood. But then I figured out this trick of having a 2x2 in the mouth and sopping it up while I was working and that worked out a lot better for me. I didn't have to spend as much time rinsing.

3. I had morning clinic and by the afternoon clinic I was completely pooped out and when I had to be a student examiner and feel other calculus, I really just didn't feel like it. I had been feeling and stressing over calculus all morning. I mostly just wanted to sit in the wet lab with my feet up on the table and talk to my peeps.

4. Loved the rock 'n' roll music playing all morning. Dr. Hanson was rocking out with a patient and that made my day.

5. I can't wait until I don't feel like I am just using patients to meet my requirements, but instead I am really doing them a big service. So grateful for all of the mockboard patients that showed up and were so awesome to help us stressing students out.

Well guys, I guess it is onward and upward. Things on my to do list: local anesthesia test, patient education assignment, CHILL!

I QUIT!

So today I just feel like quitting. Well actually it is a juxtiposition of how well my week has gone. First of all, this week is labeled hell week. Every night we have something going on and I haven't arrived home earlier than 9 this week. Then I feel  like a horrible hygienist because I can feel the deposit and I go over the same piece ten times and it is still there! Why the freak can I not scale a stupid piece of calculus!?

I am also in a deep depression because of the test I took yesterday. But it is too sad and I don't want to talk about it anymore, but I just had to get it out there.

My patient this morning had so much subgingival calculus. But the really depressing thing is that it took me like 80 minutes to scale. That is a really long time. A freaking long time. My instructor came over and she said she was worried about my time...you and me both sista!

Well I feel a little bit better after getting my woes out of my mind. Now I just need to look forward and be better.

In the thick of it

We are really getting into our clinic sessions now. Mockboards are next week and I am really excited to see how this will all pan out. I am so grateful that Prof. Alexander gives us these opportunities to see what the real day will be like so that we are prepared when that time comes around in just a few short months.

I feel like clinic has been going pretty well. I am so excited to have our final LA lab next week so that we can start giving out own injections. I was at the VA yesterday and I had 2 patients that needed LA and Prof. Bossenberger had to come and do both of them. I was actually really grateful that she did one of the guys because he was so nervous and it had been over 20 years since he had had his teeth cleaned. He actually swore at her! I am not so excited to give patients like that anesthetic because I don't like knowing that I am hurting somebody and they just have to sit through it. But then I think about how nice it is for the patient to be numb so that I can give them a super good cleaning without causing them any discomfort (during scaling at least).