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.