Warm Fuzzies

Yesterday Claudia, one of the assistants from midtown dental clinic, came up to me and told me that they had seen one of my patients and that she was just bragging about how godd I was and how gentel I was. Then today Dr. Bingham from midtown told me the same thing along with how well the tissue had reponded, it made me feel really good and made me feel that what we do makes a difference.

Toddler Tornado

So this morning I finished up two patients one of which was the last quad of my mockboard patient. This afternoon my patient cancelled so I had my wife come up last minute. She had no one to watch my kids so she brought Aiden my 2.5 yr old and Ellie who was born last week. Ellie slept in the carseat most of the time and was very well behaved except for a breif stent when I had to take a break because she was crying and wanted to eat. Aiden however was very mischevious. He had a hard time sitting still even with a coloring book and a glove filled with water that I gave him to play with. He kept trying to push buttons on the dental chair and stepping on my rheostat and ultrasonic foot pedals. He even somhow managed to unscrew the top of the faucet on the sink (which is motion activated), so all of the sudden the motion sensor went off and the faucet went off like a giser. It was very hard for me to keep my composure. Somehow though I made it through the day and even got all four quads done on my wife Yeah!!! Jenny commented to me on how much better she felt I was then when I brought her in last semester. That made me feel really good, and gave me hope that I am getting better.

Special Needs

My patient this morning was a special needs patient that Eric had seen yesterday and refered to me because my patient canceled. She was somewhat mentally handicapped and had a caretaker. I found it to be a very different appointment because of her mental state. When she first opened her mouth she had plaque caked all over the quad that Eric had cleaned the day before. I asked her if she had brushed and she told me yes. I'm pretty sure she was lying. I've heard alot of mentally handicapped people will do that just like little kids do sometimes to avoid being in trouble. Anyway I used some dislosing agent on her and showed her all of the plaque. I then went over toothbrushing with her and taught her some ways to better access the areas she was missing. She was a very nice lady overall tihngs went well. This afternoon I saw my mockboard patient again and got two more quads done on her. It was a good day.

Clinic Assistant

Today was my day to be the clinic assistant at WSU. I was very frustrated in that I felt Mr. Solomon kept getting after me for things that he didn't need to. For example when I first showed up this morning I went and turned on the x-ray processors and ran the films through to test them. Then I got ready and started checking in patents. Mr. Solomon showed up and started getting after me for not filling the ultrasonic baths. I told him I was goin to go do it after I finished checking in patients. He gave me some speal about how it needed to be done first thing in the morning and to go do it now and he would finish checking in the patients. I thought that was needless because the ultra sonic bath is used as part of the process for cleaning instruments. No one would be using it for at least an hour since thier patients were just barely showing up, so why did he insisit that it be filled before I check in patients?... I think it is because he just wanted to prove who is the boss and excercise power over me. I was very irritated. Things like that kept happening throghout the day. But I guess this is just one of those hoops I have to jump throght on my way to graduation.

Mockboard

YEAH I PASSED!!!! We had mockboards today and I passed. My patient had very sensitive lower anteriors though and by the time I wnt to have the instructors check her her anesthesia had worn off and so they could not check those areas. Instructor Wold told me that there were three test sites on those lower anteriors that she couldn't check because the patient was too sensitive. She said she talked to Professor Alexander and that they had to coun't those three against me since they couldn't verify that I had gotten the deposit off and because part of the test was choosing the right patient. But I still passed even with those points missing. So the lesson for next time is choose a better patient.

Screenings

I learned a valuable lesson today in time management of screenings. I scheduled a bunch of people for screenings for mockboardsbut I had them too close together my fist patient was late and had a mor extensive health history which put me running behind the rest of the day. Next time I am going to give myself more time between patients.

Greed

The last two days I and many of the other hygiene students participated in the Women's Health Connection at a Midtown Clinic in Ogden. This is a non profit event that women can come to and get screened to determine what kind of health care needs they have. A case worker is then assigned to make sure that each woman receives the necessary care based on priority of their needs. Our job as hygiene students was to provide oral cancer screenings and determine who was highest priority for needing restorative dental work. This is an event that Weber State Dental Hygiene participates in every year and often many patients for the hygiene clinic are found though this event. Prior to the event our entire senior class had decided to pool all the patients we found and split evenly between all of the senior students. However during the event human nature set in and greed took over. I was quite upset when I found out part way through the day that most of the students had decided that they were no longer going to submit their patients to be divided up. Many of them had tried to make sure that they stayed in the same screening groups all day and were only going to split their names between their group. I however had been oblivious to this and had had many people rotate through my screening group who wrote down the names of many of the patients that I saw. So I didn't have those names and phone numbers even though I saw the patient. I hadn't cared because I thought that we were all sharing anyway. Yesterday I guess there were only seven Seniors there so those seven people got all of the names for the whole day which I believe they saw some where between 200-400 people. I am not sure exactly how many but I know it was a lot and that there is no way that those seven students will have time in their schedules to see all of the patients that came thought the Health Connection yesterday. I think the reason that this bothers me the most is that a small group of students were not able to gather names and numbers of patients because they were assigned to be in the halls to direct people to where we were doing the oral cancer screenings. Luckily for me I was not one of those people. I left the event with a list of names that had 11 people on it, I would have had more but like I said when I was seeing a patient usually their was someone writing for me and a bunch of people rotated through my group, so many of the names of the people I saw are on other people's lists. Still I feel pretty lucky to have 11 names some of the hall people may have only gotten 3 names, some students may not have gotten any. It just makes me so furious that the students who wrote down the most names are refusing to follow through with dividing up the patients like we had all originally agreed to . How would they feel if they had been assigned to the hall and left the event with no patient names? I feel like greed has turned a bunch of people in our class into jerks because there is no way that some of those students will be able to see all of the patients on their lists. There aren't enough clinic days. So I don't see why they can't pass those names on to the people who got few or none. That is my soap