Dentisting

I'll just go ahead and admit it. I've been lazy lately. I would like to say that the reason I haven't written a blog in nearly 2 months is because I have had so much going on and just haven't had the time, but I've had lots of time.  I hardly ever have to study anymore so the hardest part of my days involves getting on the phone and scheduling patients. Honestly I'd rather study for a test. I have never been comfortable talking on the phone anyway and calling complete strangers to come in for a dental appointment with a newbie doesn't make for the easiest of conversations.  Some people pretend to be someone else when you know it is really them, some people say they don't have time to talk and will have to call you back when they never intend to, some answer and hang right up, and some butt dial you late at night and you can hear them cursing people out instead of scheduling their dental appointment.  After you get past that then you have to convince them that this is a binding obligation that they need to actually attend.  It was one thing in a real office when someone wouldn't show for a 45 minute appointment and you had thousands of other patients you could call and months worth of open appointments to offer.  Here we have 2 appointments a day. One in the morning and one in the afternoon three days a week.  So if someone cancels last minute or doesn't show (which is very often) you're out 4 hours of your time. Plus I only have about 30 patients in my personal family of patients and they only release the clinic coverage schedule 2 weeks in advance so at any given point I have at maximum 12 appointment options to offer someone and only a handful of patients who need any work done to try to squeeze into those spots.  It feels very much like a square peg round hole game most days.

Once I actually do manage to get patients scheduled the fun begins.  On the whole I have been pleasantly surprised with faculty interactions in clinic.  They monitor us enough to make sure that we are doing good work and are not endangering the patients, but they also give us a good amount of autonomy.  It is difficult to work with someone constantly hovering over your shoulder or harshly critiquing your every move and thankfully I have encountered very little of that. So far I have not gotten to do a ton of new procedures, but feel like I am starting to get into a little bit more.  Since ECU does not have a hygiene program incorporated into the dental school the dental students are responsible for all of the cleanings performed on the patients.  This means that we do a lot of cleanings and x-rays. So far I've also gotten to do a handful of fillings, work on some dentures and braces, and take out several teeth.  The extractions have been my favorite part.  The oral surgery clinic is separate from the main clinic and the oral surgeons expect more of us and therefore give us less time and more autonomy.  Instead of taking 4 hours to place a single filling in the main clinic due to constant checks and approvals in the computer system we can see as many as 8 patients in a day in oral surgery.  The patients are scheduled for us so we don't have to make all the calls (that alone would make oral surgery my favorite), we tell the faculty any pertinent information about each patient and what the planned procedure is before we start and then they expect us to take it from there.  I feel like each time I'm there I advance so much from where I was before.

This was one of the teeth I got to extract last week.

 A set of dentures I made up in wax with the teeth set where they belong.

Some retainers I got to make in ortho lab

Hopefully things will continue on a good track and I'll get better at calling people on the phone.  I may need to start offering incentives or threats to keep people from cancelling though.