I love seeing family!

My son was a real trooper this morning.  I brought him in bright and early with me to clean his teeth.  I had to reschedule my original patient due to an infection.  It is so nice seeing family because you can pass off PEs that you wouldn't want to inflict on regular patients!  Poor Hayden!  First of all, he needed to have a sealant redone.  I don't mind paying the $6 when it helps me with something for school.  I was also able to use the diagnodent to check his tooth for any cavities.  Diagnodent & Sealant PEs: check & check.  I knew that I had plenty of time with him, so I decided to do the Saliva pH test with him.  Prof. Wold told me she hasn't really seen this done on a child before, but I was bound and determined to do it on him.  He really was a good kid.  He did what I asked of him.  I don't think he spit as much saliva out as he was supposed to, but he did ok.  Caries Risk Assessment PE: check.  What a productive morning!  Another 4 quads of a 1A and 3 PEs passed off.

I love when patients are so flexible.  My called my afternoon patient and informed him that I could see him earlier than 1:45 pm.  He very willingly came in at 12:30 and was even early.  I only had 2 quads to finish on him.  This patient for some reason keeps forgetting to eat before coming in to see me.  He is diabetic and often times needs me to provide him with something to eat before releasing him from the clinic.  Both times I have seen him, I have had to check his blood sugar at the end of the appointment.  He has been low both times.  Thank heavens for Mrs. Neeley's candy dish that has provided him with enough sugar to get him home.

Mock Board

What an experience!  I didn't "pass" the mock board, but it was great to see how the boards will actually go.  It was really stressful.  I was so glad that I got mine over with in the morning.  It gave me the afternoon to think through how it went and realized that it was a good experience.  I also choose a harder classification of patient for this exam.  So, over all I felt that I didn't do too bad.  I ended up missing 4 areas, my x-rays weren't sufficient because my patient is pregnant, and I missed one probe spot.  I felt pretty confident about my probe readings, but I will need to be more careful next time.  We will have 2 more mock board experiences in the spring.  I hope that they go better.

Now I need to talk about the blu boa.  I still haven't decided if I like it very much.  Each patient that I have used it on, it hasn't been efficient at removing the water from their mouth.  My mock board patient was choking on the water because it wasn't removing all of it.  It has been more efficient for me to have my patient hold the saliva ejector and have me pause periodically to have them suction.

Crazy X-ray

I had kind of an interesting day today.  My morning patient was late getting there, but once he and his parents arrived, I got 2 sets of bitewing x-rays and cleaned a 1B.  I was disappointed in myself though.  I missed several areas on the lingual surface of this patient.  He was pretty jumpy and had really bad gingivitis due to having braces.  I just feel so ineffective as a clinician when I can't remove all of the calculus from a simple 1B patient.

Anyway, on to my crazy x-ray story.  I had failed to look up my afternoon patient's phone number before leaving on Monday, thus I didn't confirm her.  Right before lunch, I thought I better call.  She answered the phone and said she was glad that I had called.  She said that afternoon wasn't going to work out after all.  I tell her that is fine and get her rescheduled for November.  I go to lunch thinking, "Oh great!  Now what am I going to do?"  I tell my friends and Heather says she has two patients coming in for the afternoon and that I am welcome to have one of them.  Great!  Well, the one girl shows up, but her sister didn't come.  Back to square one!  I go to the front desk and start looking up names from the resource list.  I call a few people.  No answer.  I then come across a name that says they can come in on short notice.  Perfect!  I call him, he can come in.  I wait about 45 minutes and he arrives.  Go through the health history.  While talking he says to be careful with his upper left lateral incisor.  He explains that he had been hit in the mouth while playing rugby and that the tooth is loose.  I tell him it would be a good idea to take an x-ray of the tooth to make sure everything is ok with it.  We take the x-ray and there is a perfect root fracture staring me in the face!  It even looked like the canine may have been fractured as well.  I show it to my instructor and she tells me that I can't do anything else on him.  I need to refer him to a dentist and tell him to get there asap.  I felt really bad, because he asked me what they might have to do.  I told him that for a fracture like that they may need to extract the tooth and put in an implant and crown.  He didn't seem pleased to hear that news.  But when you play a contact sport like rugby, that is a chance you take when you step onto the field.  I will follow up with him this week to make sure he is getting in.