Kind of a crumby day

Kayla was a super big sweetheart and traded VA days with me.  I needed last Thursday to stay home with Zach, so I went today.  My first patient of the day was a very typical older gentleman.  Very nice and pleasant to work on.  He was a class II, which I have a ton of quads of.  I had him completed by 10:30 at the latest.  So, I hang out until lunch time which is from 12:30-1:30.  At this point I have been sitting around for 2 hours.  I have tried to be productive by helping the other girls clean their rooms and studying for a boards.  After lunch, my patient no-shows.  He had just scheduled his appointment the day before or today and he no-shows.  It is so frustrating when this happens.  One of the dentist's was seeing a patient for a cleaning, but needed to do some temporary crowns first.  I was going to see this patient, but the Dr. didn't finish with him until 3:20.  I found out that we are supposed to be done with patients by 3:30.  As you can see, this only gives me 10 minutes to complete anything.  What I bum deal!  I have got to realize that anything can happen at the VA.  We are at the mercy of the patients.  There are just times when it doesn't work out for us students.  I also realized that we as friends and fellow students need to be aware of who has seen more patients at the VA.  If someone has a cancellation in the morning, it wouldn't be right for that person to not have a patient in the afternoon.  Or if someone gets two patients in the morning and another person's no-shows for the afternoon, they should be given the first person's afternoon patient.  We have got to take care of each other and make sure that patient opportunities are fairly equal while we are there.